02-05-2022

UNITED COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & RESEARCH NAINI, ALLAHABAD

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT

Quality Management
Subject Code: KOE 085

UNIT IV

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DEFECT STUDY

• Home appliances are made of few components, automobiles are made of several hundred components and

aerospace vehicles are made of several thousand components.

• Any component failure makes the equipment or machinery non- functional. Just imagine during a critical

war a missile fails due to a component failure, it would be disastrous.

• In short, failure of a component can lead to loss of time, money and inconvenience.

• Defect studies cost money as it requires the time of engineers and technicians and test facilities. In some

cases, the products are also destroyed in testing.

• A defect study requires proper planning. Its responsibility should be clearly defined.

IDENTIFICATION OF DEFECTS

• A defect is generally a deviation from the specified quality standard.

• In a complex product, the defective process stage has to be identified to find the basic cause.

• Study of symptom and their correlation with the defects can be used.

• In another approach, the assemblies or the system may be replaced one by one until the defect is removed.

• Similarly, the defect in a product involving several processes, the process causing the defects has to be

identified.

• Defects may be due to faulty casting, defective material, poor metal finishing or improper heat treatment.

• Finally, the process responsible for the defect is identified.

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ANALYSIS OF DEFECT

• The basic cause of the defect needs to be identified for remedial actions. The process is analyzed for variable factors.

• If there are several variables, extensive measurement/testing is needed. Special tests may be needed in complex

processes.

• The cause can be linked to non-conformance of certain quality characteristics. The analysis should lead to the ultimate

reason of nonconformance.

• The ultimate reason may be the inadequate process capability of the machine, poor setting, a worn jig, improper

design and specifications such as illegible drawing prints, impractical design or incompatible component, improper

materials such as untested substandard materials, improper operating and supervisory staff such as inadequate

skill, unable to understand manufacturing drawings, or inadequate supervision, improper process control and

inspection such as inadequate process, improper test equipment, dated calibration, unskilled inspections.

CORRECTIVE MEASURES

• Normally, the cause itself indicate the remedy a such as replacement of an obsolete drawing or calibration of

equipment.

• In other cases, remedial measures may require considerable analysis.

• The process may be unable to achieve the specified tolerance. Remedy can be alternative method, relative

assembly, or 100% inspection of the affected component, or provide wider tolerance.

• Consultation with all the concerned departments is done on the various possible methods of avoiding defects. The

remedial measures may consider economics of various alternatives.

• After corrective measures, it must be carefully monitored to see whether the defect has been eliminated or

minimized.

• The process of the adjustment of remedial measures and study of their effect is continued until the problem is

completely resolved.

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PRODUCT QUALITY

• The easiest way to define quality would be “The degree to which a product meets the requirement of a

customer.”

• Quality control includes all efforts to manage quality and maintain assurance of continued high quality of

product or service.

• An item, even if produced to a level of quality higher than that demanded by the customer will not be

appreciated if its cost is too high or if it is delivered too late.

• In the year 1987, the ISO 9000 series was brought out as a guideline for developing a quality system.

• This help a company in designing, building and maintaining quality of a product thus satisfying the

requirements of the customer on a consistent basis.

MAINTAINABILITY

• The time taken to repair a system depends on how it has been designed. Further, the design and installation
characteristics will also dictate the maintenance policy.
• “Maintainability (M) is the probability that a system will be restored to operational (specified conditions)
effectiveness within a given period of time when the maintenance action is performed in accordance with
prescribed procedure.”
• It is a characteristic of the design and installation of the unit or system.
• Maintenance is of two types:
• Preventive
• Corrective

Contd….

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MAINTAINABILITY

• Both types of maintenance activity result in down time. In case of preventive (or scheduled maintenance) the down time
is called scheduled interruption of service, whereas in the case of corrective (or unscheduled maintenance) it is called
unscheduled or emergency interruption of service.
• Meantime of maintenance action 

• The maintenance action rate is calculated as the reciprocal of the mean time of maintenance action and is expressed as:

• The second term in parenthesis represents the probability of not performing a maintenance action within the maximum
available time t, therefore, [1 – exp (– 𝜇t)] is equal to the probability of completing the action in this time. The
maximum allowable time, t is called the maintenance time constant.

FACTORS AFFECTING MAINTAINABILITY

• Design for minimum maintenance skills.

• Design for minimum tools.
• Design for minimum adjustments.
• Use of standard interchangeable parts/components.
• Grouping of sub-systems which can be easily located and identified.
• Provision for visual inspection.
• Use of colour coding for wires to facilitate tracing faults.
• Use of overload indicators, alarms and lighted fuses.
• Making parts and components easily accessible.
• Designing for safety using interlocks, safety covers and guarded switches.

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MEASURE OF MAINTAINABILITY
• The first step in measuring maintainability is to define its down time - the interval during which the systems is not in
an acceptable operating conditions. Down time is divided into three components:

(a) Active repair time (b) Logistics time (c) Administrative time

• Active repair time is the time during which one or more technicians are actually working on repair, replacements and
adjustments, etc. This time is sensitive to environment, technician skill level, procedure, etc.

• Logistic time is the down time in hours lost in waiting for parts or components needed to do the repair/placement.

• Administrative time includes all down time which is not specifically allocated to either active or logistic time. This time
is due to administrative procedure such as filling forms accounting and storage, etc.

• Mean down time takes into account the down time due to preventive and corrective maintenance

where, Fp, Fc = No. of preventive and corrective maintenance tasks per 1000 hours respectively.
Mct, Mpt = Mean corrective and preventive maintenance down time, respectively.

FAILURES

• Continually measuring the reliability of a machine, product or process is an essential part of total

Quality Management.

• When acquiring new machines, creating a new product, or even modifying an existing product, it is always

necessary to determine the reliability of the product or process.

• One of the most powerful methods available for measuring the reliability of the product or process is

FMEA(Failure Mode Effect Analysis)

• FMEA attempts to detect the potential product-related failure modes.

CONTD…..

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FAILURES

• Any deviation in the properties of an item from the prescribed conditions is considered a fault and an item is

considered to have failed under following three conditions.

• When it becomes completely inoperable.

• When it is still operable but is no longer able to perform its intended function satisfactorily.

• When serious deterioration has made it unreliable or unsafe for continued use.

• Frequency of failures is a measure of reliability.

• If failure frequency is high, then the system is considered unreliable.

CAUSES OF FAILURES Contd…

Deficiencies in Design
• Engineering efforts and changes in design: This is due to making very little engineering efforts to avoid
design features known to be conductive to failure e.g. intersection of two mechanical notches. When
changes in design are made without adequate consideration of possible introduction of stress raisers.
• Upgrading of a Part: A new application in which a part must withstand service conditions more sever than
its former use, sometimes may result in early failure.
• Insufficient Design Criteria: Deficiency in design may result from impossibility of making reliable stress
calculations for complex parts.
Deficiencies in Material
• Many failure originate due to imperfection in material as given under:
 Material imperfection reduces the overall strength of the material.
 It provide preferential path for propagation of cracks.
 Act as notches or provide paths for intergranular corrosion.

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Causes of Failures
Deficiencies in Processing
• Few of processes that contribute to failure are cold forming, machining and grinding, identification marking,
improper heat treatment, acid picking, electroplating, welding, re-working etc.
Errors in Assembly
• Failure in service sometimes result from error in assembly, that were not detected in inspection by the
manufacturer or purchaser. Failure may also occur due to an operator’s negligence.
Improper Service Conditions
• Abnormal severe conditions of speed, loading temperature and chemical environment is often a major
contribution to occurrence of service failures.
Inadequate Maintenance
• Maintenance procedures should be thoroughly revaluated when failures recur despite scheduled
maintenance.

Types of Failures Contd…

a) Early Failures: Variation in manufacturing process and poor-quality control techniques during

production cause early failures and these failures occur in the early life of system operation.

b) Chance Failures: During the actual working of the system, the chance failures are pre-dominant. These

failures are random, irregular and unexpected. Sudden stress accumulations beyond the design strength of

the component can be one of the reasons of chance failures.

c) Wear Out Failures: Aging or wearing out of components cause wear out failures. Such failures are due

to improper maintenance or no maintenance, and the failure became frequent. These failures can be

arrested for sometime by preventive maintenance of the system at intervals.

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Types of Failures
d) Life Cycle Curve: The life cycle consists of three distinct failures. There is high frequency of failure
during the testing, i.e., first phase. It drops off rapidly as the failed components are replaced by good and
tested component.
• The second phase is during actual operation or the useful life of the system where in chance failures
take place.
• Next period is wear out or aging when failures starts increasing.

Modes of Failures
(a) Catastrophic Failures: System becomes inoperative suddenly due to catastrophic failures. Such failures
are random. If the failure rate is known, then one can statistically predict the probability of occurrence of
one or more catastrophic failures for any time period e.g. Blowing of fuse in an electric circuit.
(b) Degradation or Creeping Failures: These failures occur gradually due to change of some parameter with
time, proper inspection can detect such failures and subsequently eliminated. e.g. a drop in power output
due to a decrease in the value of a transconductance in a radio tube.
(c) Independent Failures: Such failures are not generated by other failures. It can be catastrophic,
degradation or wear out type e.g. failure of a fan belt of an automobile is no way related to the puncturing
of the tyre of the wheel.
(d) Secondary Failures: Some primary failure can cause secondary failure e.g. a tyre burst can cause
breaking the spokes in a motorcycle travelling at high speed. Thus, breaking of spoke is a secondary
failure. If a resistor in an electronic circuit is shorted, then it may cause an excessive drain on the tube.
Consequently, tube failure is a secondary failure.

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DEFINITION OF RELIABILITY
• The reliability can be defined in many ways such as:
(i) It is the integral of the distribution of probabilities of failure-free operation from the instant of switch on
to the first failure.
(ii) It is probability that a device will operate without failure for a given period of time under given operating
conditions.
(iii) Reliability definition given by the Electronic Industries Association (EIA) USA states that:
“Reliability is the probability of an item performing its intended function over a given period of
time under the operating conditions encountered.” The above definition has following important
elements:
(a) Probability
(b) Intended Function
(c) Time
(d) Operating Conditions Contd…

DEFINITION OF RELIABILITY
(a) Probability: Some items may have very short life, some very long life and a group of items may have a
certain average life. Frequency distribution is used to identify life of each item. Suppose the probability of
survival of an item operating for 15 hours is 0.80, it indicates that we could expect the item would be
operating only 80 times out of 100 after a 15 hour operating period.
(b) Intended Function: There are several occasions where in one component failure does affect the main
function considerably. But there are cases where a component failure may lead to complete breakdown of
the system or equipment or machinery and intended function cannot be achieved. Simplest example can be
an automobile where in if a spark plug fails, the automobile is still functional. In case, engine fails,
automobile becomes non-functional.
(c) Time: It is period during which the system or machinery is expected to function without failures. It can be
seconds, minutes, hours, days, months or years depending on the system or machinery.
(d) Operating Conditions: It can be temperature, humidity, pressure, shock, vibration, gravity. All these
parameters have to be in a specific range for normal functioning.

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PRODUCT RELIABILITY ASPECT

Reliability engineering covers all aspects of a product’s life, from its conception, subsequent design and
production processes, through its practical use lifetime, with maintenance support and availability. Reliability
engineering covers Reliability, Maintainability and Availability.
a) The Reliability Bathtub Curve: Most products exhibit failure characteristics as shown in the bathtub
curve of Figure

PRODUCT RELIABILITY ASPECT

b) Minimizing the Manufacturer’s Cost: Figure shows the product reliability on the x-axis and the
producer’s cost on the y-axis. If the producer increases the reliability of his product, he will increase the
cost of the design and/or production of the product. However, a low production and design cost does not
imply a low overall product cost.

Contd…

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PRODUCT RELIABILITY ASPECT

• The overall product cost should not be calculated as the cost of the product when it leaves the shipping dock,

but as the total cost of the product through its lifetime.

• This includes warranty and replacement costs for defective products, costs incurred by loss of customers due

to defective products, loss of subsequent sales, etc.

• By increasing product reliability, one may increase the initial product costs, but decrease the support costs.

• An optimum minimal total product cost can be determined and implemented by calculating the optimum

reliability for such a product.

• The total product cost is the sum of the production and design costs as well as the other post-shipment costs.

• It can be seen that at an optimum reliability level, the total product cost is at a minimum. The optimum

reliability level is the one that coincides with the minimum total cost over the entire lifetime of the product.

ADVANTAGES OF RELIABILITY ENGINEERING PROGRAM

• The following list presents advantages that can be obtained with the implementation of a sound reliability
program:
• Optimum break-even period.
• Optimum warranty period and estimated warranty costs.
• Optimum preventive replacement time for components in a repairable system.
• Spare parts requirements and production rate, resulting in improved inventory control through correct
prediction of spare parts requirements.
• Better information about the types of failures experienced for parts and systems that aid design, research and
development efforts to minimize these failures.
• Establishment of system to know failure occurrence time in the life of a product and better preparation to
cope with them.
• Studies of the effects of age, service duration and application and operation stress levels on reliability.

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ADVANTAGES OF RELIABILITY ENGINEERING PROGRAM

• The following list presents advantages that can be obtained with the implementation of a sound reliability
program:
• Optimum break-even period.
• Optimum warranty period and estimated warranty costs.
• Optimum preventive replacement time for components in a repairable system.
• Spare parts requirements and production rate, resulting in improved inventory control through correct
prediction of spare parts requirements.
• Better information about the types of failures experienced for parts and systems that aid design, research and
development efforts to minimize these failures.
• Establishment of system to know failure occurrence time in the life of a product and better preparation to
cope with them.
• Studies of the effects of age, service duration and application and operation stress levels on reliability.

AVAILABILITY
• The availability of a system is the probability that it is operating satisfactorily when called upon to
perform its function. It takes into account both failures and repair of system.
• The term reliability is concerned with the system’s capability of survival, whereas maintainability is related
to the system repair by combining, these two factors, a family of parameters is obtained which indicates the
system availability.
• Given below various definitions of availability according to their applicability.

Contd…

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AVAILABILITY

FACTORS OF RELIABILITY
• Life characteristics operating conditions and the failure distribution help in prediction of system reliability.
Hence, the first step in reliability prediction is life characteristics determination.
• Repairability or non-repairability decides measurability of life length. The life of a repairable item can be
measured by failure rate or Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).
• (a) Failure Rate: Failures per unit time is the failure rate. It can be expressed in failures per hours or failures
per 100 or 1000 hours. It is defined as:

• Failure is almost constant if the design is stabilized. The reliability of the system is higher if the failure rate
is smaller.

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FACTORS OF RELIABILITY
• (b) Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): When failure rate is almost constant, MTBF is reciprocal of
the failure rate or the ratio of the total test time T and the number of failures.

• MTBF is also known as the average time of satisfactory operations of the system, Reliability of the system is
higher if the MTBF is larger.
• Mean Time to Failure (MTTF): If t1, t2, t3, ..., tn are failure times of n items in a life test, then the mean
time failure is given as:

• If the item is non-repairable, MTTF is used.

• Failure analysis helps in determining the basic reason of failure, and based on its determination and
subsequent corrective action.

COLLECTION OF RELIABILITY DATA

• Failure analysis should be directed from the beginning towards finding out specific information on the
manufacturing, processing and service histories and photographic records of failed components or system, etc.
• Background data collection on manufacturing and fabricating history of component needs to begin with
getting specification and drawing. It should cover all design aspects of the components.
• Manufacturing and fabricating related data may be Mechanical Processing, Thermal Processing, Chemical
Processing etc.
• Data can be based on service history. Special attention need to be given to environmental details e.g. normal
and abnormal loading, accidental overloads, cyclic loads, variations in temperature, pressure, etc.
• Analyst needs to decide whether photograph of the failed component or system is required or not. It is better
to have all photographs (4” × 5” minimum) taken by a large camera to permit detailed enlargement.
• Analyst needs to ensure that the samples are suitable for intended purpose and that they sufficiently represent
the characteristic of failure.

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Reliability Data Usage

Reliability data usage are as follows:
(i) The information regarding the reliability requirements w.r.t maintainability, availability and mean life.
(ii) The causes of failure and relegate them to their proper perspective can be highlight whether these failures
are due to design, usage or other factors.
(iii) The areas needing improvement, modifications, effect of sub-systems and interconnecting links can also
be determined.
(iv) A means of comparing results with those obtained by simulated tests in factory and establish correlation
between them can also be provided by field data.
(v) Deviation, if any, between simulated field tests can be found out using this information.
(vi) The information about logistics, maintenance, operations, administrative delays and spares requirements
can also be provided by using reliability data.
(vii) Estimation of the degradation and wear out characteristics of components can done using reliability data.

Reliability Data Sources

• There are many sources for collecting data. Some of sources at various levels are as follows:

(i) Report on raw material
(ii) Report of standard part supplies
(iii) Inspection record receiving
(iv) Shop order and inspection record
(v) Report of welding and X-ray
(vi) Log sheets of test
(vii) Report of failure
(viii) Build ups and assembly logs
(ix) Report on field failure
(x) Report of service trouble
(xi) Records of maintenance
(xii) Department of quality control
(xiii) Market research
(xiv) Experience of customers

• Some agencies have created/collected failure/reliability data on specific component/equipment. Such data
can be used for future design, development and production of similar type of components.

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RELIABILITY MEASUREMENT
• (a) Failure Rate (𝝀): Failure rate is computed as simple ratio of the number of failures, F, during a specified
test interval to the total test of the items undergoing test. If the failure rate value is smaller, then the
reliability of system is higher.

• (b) Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF): It is reciprocal of the constant failure rate or ratio of test time
due to the number of failures. MTBF is also taken as average time of satisfactory operation of system.
Largest the MTBF, higher the reliability.

RELIABILITY MEASUREMENT
• (c) Mean Time to Failure (MTTF): If we have life test information on n items with failure times t1, t2
.......... tn, then MTTF is defined as:

• In case of repairable items, measurement of life can be done by failure rate. (𝜆 and MTBF)
• In case of non-repairable items, measurement of life can be done by mean time to failure (MTTF).

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ZERO DEFECT
• The purpose of the system is to eliminate identified defects by prevention of occurrence to a maximum
extent, if not completely.
• The spirit of zero-defect is prevention of defects by doing it right first time and every time.
• This leads to minimization of defects to bare minimum and tending to zero with drive for continuous
improvement.
• With this programme continual lowering of defect level is achieved by following different improvement
tools.

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