Design for ReliabilityEdition 1

Today's marketplace demands product reliability. At the same time, it places ever-increasing demands on products that push the limits of their performance and their functional life, and it does so with the expectation of lower per-unit product costs. To meet these demands, product design now requires a focused, streamlined, concurrent engineering process that will produce a product at the lowest possible cost in the least amount of time. Design for Reliability provides a systematic approach to the design process that is sharply focused on reliability and firmly based on the physics of failure. It imparts an understanding of how, why, and when to use the wide variety of reliability engineering tools available and offers fundamental insight into the total design cycle. Applicable from the idea phase of the product development cycle through product obsolescence, Design for Reliability (DfR) concepts integrated with reliability verification and analytical physics form a coherent stage gate/phase design process that helps ensure that a product will meet customers' reliability objectives. Whether you are a high-volume manufacturer of consumer items or a low volume producer of military commodities, your goal is the same: to bring a product to market using a process focused on designing out or mitigating potential failure modes prior to production release. Readers of Design for Reliability will learn to meet that goal and move beyond solidifying a basic offering to the marketplace to creating a true competitive advantage.