Reliability assessment and accelerated life testing in a metalworking plant

Reliability assessments are useful for determining how well products, systems, and services maintain their quality over the course of time and through various conditions. In this paper, a reliability assessment of a metalworking plant was conducted, as well as accelerated life testing of the plant's spot-welded and riveted products. The overall layout of the plant was complex, requiring the use of equations to calculate the reliability of stations being connected in series and parallel in order to determine the overall reliability of the system. Furthermore, equations for mean life and failure rate were used in determining the estimate of mean life for the tested components, as well as the rate at which the components fail, respectively. The results indicated that the metalworking plant had a reliability of 0.81 or 81%. Moreover, the results indicated that the failure data of the spot-welded products follow the exponential model, with the failure rate of the products being constant throughout the period under investigation. The failure data of the riveted products follow the Weibull model, increasing throughout the period under investigation. This study presents a procedure for aiding production and maintenance managers in conducting reliability assessments of their production systems.