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Reliability and Risk Management Flashcards

6 cards from real CQE practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.

Read the first 6 Reliability and Risk Management flashcards as text

  1. What does the 'bathtub curve' in reliability engineering represent?

    Answer: The failure rate pattern showing infant mortality, useful life, and wear-out phases

    The bathtub curve depicts three phases of product failure rate: early failures (infant mortality), random failures during useful life, and increasing failures during wear-out.

  2. Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is a reliability metric applicable to:

    Answer: Repairable items that can be restored to service

    MTBF applies to repairable systems and represents the average time between successive failures after repair, distinct from MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) used for non-repairable items.

  3. In a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), the Risk Priority Number (RPN) is calculated as:

    Answer: Severity × Occurrence × Detection

    RPN is the product of three ratings: Severity (impact of failure), Occurrence (likelihood of cause), and Detection (ability to detect before reaching customer), each typically rated 1–10.

  4. What is the primary purpose of a Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)?

    Answer: To identify combinations of events that could lead to a top-level undesired event

    FTA is a top-down, deductive analysis that uses Boolean logic to identify all possible combinations of hardware failures, human errors, and external events that could cause a specific undesired top event.

  5. In reliability testing, accelerated life testing (ALT) is used to:

    Answer: Expose products to stresses above normal levels to induce failures faster and predict life

    ALT applies elevated stress levels (temperature, voltage, vibration) to precipitate failures in a shorter time, allowing engineers to extrapolate reliability performance under normal use conditions.

  6. Which reliability metric describes the probability that a system will be operational at any given random point in time?

    Answer: Availability

    Availability is the probability that a repairable system is in an operational state at a random point in time, combining both reliability (failure rate) and maintainability (repair rate).