Reliability and Functional Safety

Burgess Consulting Limited (BCL) uses Reliability Workbench 13.0 – the latest Safety, Reliability and Availability software from Isograph.

FTA / ETA
The Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Event Tree Analysis (ETA) methods are mainly used in the fields of safety engineering and reliability engineering to understand how systems can fail, to identify the best ways to reduce risk or to determine event rates of a safety hazard / accident or a particular system level failure.

This allows for the identification of failure modes in the system and for the gathering of evidence that failures are effectively mitigated against.

BCL uses fault tree analysis to represent the logical relationship between sub-system and component failures and how they combine to cause system failures. Failure and repair data is assigned to the system components, allowing us to analyse and calculate the reliability and availability parameters for the system and identify critical components.

BCL also use event tree analysis to provide a logical representation of the possible outcomes following a hazardous event. This allows BCL to provide an inductive approach to reliability and risk assessment.

Markov analysis provides a method of analyzing the reliability and availability of sub-systems representing components with strong interdependencies.

FMECA
Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis is a procedure for identifying potential failure modes in a given system and classifying them according to their severity values.

BCL can construct FMECAs to MIL-STD-1629A, BS 5760 Part 5, GJB 1391-92, AIAG FMEA 3, SAE J1739, ARP5580 and similar standards as well as customizable FMECAs for individual client requirements.

FMEA
Failure Mode & Effects Analysis is a step-by-step approach enabling us to identify all possible failures in a design, a manufacturing or assembly process, or a product or service.

MTTF
The Reliability Growth module of Reliability Workbench analyzes test data by calculating scale and shape parameters that define a growth curve that fits the data. The scale and shape parameters can be used to calculate failure intensity, Mean Time to Failure (MTTF), or Unreliability at an arbitrary time. This allows us to determine if there is an improving or worsening trend in reliability in a system.

MTBF
Burgess Consulting can also calculate Mean Time Between Failures, the predicted elapsed time between inherent failures of repairable mechanical or electronic systems.

The Reliability Workbench FaultTree, FMECA and FMEA software modules have been tested and certified by SGS-TÜV as suitable for safety analyses according to ISO26262.