Track 1 Session 1

9:10 to 10:10 a.m. Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The Reliability Sleuth – A Proposal for a Troubleshooting Process

The traditional view of reliability engineering involves the analysis of life data for launched products or the search for possible future failure modes in products that are under development, along with prognostication of the risk of occurrence of those same failure modes by means of accelerated life testing. However, the practitioner is often faced with the problem of understanding the true mechanisms behind known failures; information that is needed in order to attend to the problem properly. Knowing why the problem occurs is often the difference between a quick fix and the permanent elimination of its cause. This presentation discusses a real customer claim and how it eventually was resolved using methods based on factorial design experiments and structured problem analysis.

Key Words: Troubleshooting, Problem Analysis, Factorial Design Experiments, Accelerated Life Testing, Life Data Analysis

Peder Andersson

Tetra Pak Packaging Solutions AB

Lund, Sweden