Reliability HotWire is a monthly eMagazine by ReliaSoft providing information and tips on how to best improve your reliability practices and get the most out of ReliaSoft’s tools for reliability and life data analysis. This article will discuss some simple systems and the methods that are applicable for each case of conditional reliability.
Engineers are often asked to estimate the reliability of not just new systems, but also of systems that have already spent some time in the field. If one wants to do this estimation using a bottom-up approach with the help of a reliability block diagram in BlockSim (i.e., estimating system reliability using component-level information of the system), then care must be taken as to how that calculation is performed in order to avoid incorrect results.
In some cases, one can compute the conditional reliability of a system using BlockSim’s QCP via one of two methods: 1) Using the conditional reliability function with all blocks set to a current age of zero, or 2) Using the reliability function with all blocks set to a current age of T. In other cases, the conditional reliability can be computed using only the first method.
For full article, view: Reliability Hotwire – Issue 193 March 2017