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What is a Failure?
"Failure" can have multiple meanings. Let us briefly examine one device's "failures":
An Uninterruptible Power Source (UPS) may have five functions under two conditions:
While the main power is available:
o Allow power to flow from the main source to the machine being protected
o Condition the power by limiting surges or brownouts
o Store power in a battery, up to the battery's full charge
When the main power is interrupted:
Supply continuous power to the machine being protected
Emit a signal to indicate that the main power is off
There is no question that the UPS has failed if it prevents main power from flowing to the machine
being protected (function 1). Failures for functions 2, 3 or 5 may not be obvious, because the
"protected" machine is still running on main power or on the battery supply. Even if noticed, these
failures may not trigger immediate corrective measures because the "protected" machine is still running
and it may be more important to keep it running than to repair or replace the UPS.
What is Availability?
The "availability" of a device is, mathematically, MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR) for scheduled working time.
The automobile in the earlier example is available for 150/156 = 96.2% of the time. The repair is
unscheduled down time.
With an unscheduled half-hour oil change every 50 hours – when a dashboard indicator alerts the
driver – availability would increase to 50/50.5 = 99%.
If oil changes were properly scheduled as a maintenance activity, then availability would be 100%.
Why are these important for reliablity ?
"Availability" is a key performance indicator in manufacturing; it is part of the "Overall Equipment
Effectiveness" (OEE) metric.
A production schedule that includes down time for preventative maintenance can accurately predict
total production. Schedules that ignore Mean Time Between Failures and Mean Time To Repair are
simply future disasters awaiting remediation.
How to calculate actual Mean Time Between
Failures
Actual or historic Mean Time Between Failures is calculated using observations in the real world.
(There is a separate discipline for equipment designers, based on the components and anticipated
workload).
Calculating actual Mean Time Between Failures requires a set of observations; each observation is:
Uptime_moment: the moment at which a machine began operating (initially or after a repair)
Downtime_moment: the moment at which a machine failed after operating since the previous
uptime-moment
So each Time Between Failure (TBF) is the difference between one Uptime_moment observation and
the subsequent Downtime_moment.
Three quantities are required:
n = Number of observations.
ui = This is the ith Uptime_moment
di = This is the ith Downtime_moment following the ith Uptime_moment
So Mean Time Between Failures = Sum (di – ui)/ n , for all i = 1 through n observations. More simply,
it is the total working time divided by the number of failures.
By Oskar Olofsson
Read more:
KPI's in Manufacturing Plant Maintenance
Preventive Maintenance
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