Q: Could you briefly explain your role, involvement and experience with regards to this seminar?
James Pugh (JP): I am the Senior Quality Engineer responsible for product reliability for all personal care projects within UK New Product Development at Dyson, working with the Design Teams to ensure we develop reliable products.
Jon Wiggins (JW): As RA Engineering Manager at Rotork Controls, my role is to design and adapt equipment intended for arduous duties and environments. I have a background in plant reliability and product design.
Scott Mitchell (SM): I am the Design Engineering Manager for Caterpillar Defense Powertrains, having design responsibly for engines, transmissions and powertrains used in military vehicles. As the vehicles in which our products are used grow in weight and/or power there is constant challenge to ensure reliability of the product is maintained, or even bettered, whilst the capability of the product is grown.
Gordon Bailey (GB): I am Chief Mechanical Design Engineer for Airbus Helicopters UK. I lead a team of Designers and Analysts and between us we develop modifications for Rotorcraft to meet specific customer requirements.
Mahmood Shafiee (MS): I am Associate Professor and Leader of a Research Group in “Risk, Reliability & Maintenance Engineering” at the Department of Energy and Power, Cranfield University. I have more than fifteen years’ experience of research and consultancy in the fields of Smart Maintenance, Asset Reliability, Prognostics and Health Management (PHM), Risk Analysis, Life Prediction & Extension; Predictive Maintenance; and Uncertainty Quantification. I have worked as a researcher within a range of industry sectors including Offshore Renewables (Wind, Wave, Tidal), Oil and Gas, Transport (Rail and Shipping) and Manufacturing at several European, American and Asian Universities and Institutions.
Q: What are the main engineering challenges facing the industry at the moment and what are the most common issues you hear from colleagues?
JW: Cyber security and the impact on safety and reliability in equipment. The next is the desire to use new materials and techniques, but these lack the field experience to be accepted.
JP: Development of new technology in order to keep ahead of the competition.
MS: The main engineering challenges include extraction of knowledge from design and operation data and make informed decision-making for the reliability and maintenance analysis of assets. One of the most common issues I hear from colleagues is on how to improve decisions based on the extensive amount of data collected from different sources such as monitoring systems and sensors.
GB: Our main challenges on a day-to-day basis is to develop safe and certifiable modifications within very challenging timescales and budgets.
SM: Lack of investment in developing engineers. Too short timescales, not enough resource.
Q: What key topics are you excited to speak about?
JP: How we capture data through use of global data logging product trials.
JW: How good equipment and plant design can lead to reliability without adding complexity or cost.
MS: I am most excited to speak about the role of redundancy design in reliability and maintainability of engineering systems.
GB: I am keen to discuss how a reliable product enhances safe operations, improves customer satisfaction, and reduces in-service support costs.
SM: How we’ve used analysis tools to predict improvements in reliability.
Q: Who else are you most interested in hearing from on the programme, and why?
SM: Kevin Rayment from Network Rail. I’m interested to understand how they implemented DFR.
GB: I am looking forward to hearing from James Pugh on how Dyson capture and use data to improve reliability.
JP: Alexandra Knight – interested to hear how we can make better use of data we collect to predict product reliability.
MS: I am interested in hearing other speakers from academia and industry about their best practices in design for reliability.
JW: All different points of views from other industries and perspectives. We all have our own driven by current field and past experience. It is good to have this challenged.
Q: What is your top tip in terms of designing for reliability?
JP: Exploitation of usage data to set product specs and develop testing reflective of real life usage.
SM: Ensure the data you use to design with is as representative as possible of how the product/component will be used!
JW: Think twice, design once.
MS: When designing a system, it is crucial to take into account reliability measures. Complex designs are not necessarily highly reliable.
GB: Keep the design as simple as possible!
Q: Why is it important for engineers to join this seminar?
JP: Reliability is fundamental to the quality of any product. If you want your customers to keep coming back, you need to produce good quality and therefore, reliable products.
GB: A reliable product ensures customer satisfaction and reduced in-service support costs for the supplier – this is key to a company’s performance and needs to be understood by the Engineering team.
JW: As with my previous answer, it is a chance to have your perception challenged and hear other industries practice and methods. This sharing of information will lead to the good aspects being copied to other sectors.
MS: This seminar is important for system designers and engineers as they can be more familiar with the recent advances in design for reliability.
SM: To gain an understanding how product reliability requirements can affect the design process.
Q: What developments are you most interested in for the future and why?
MS: I am most interested in digitalisation of design for reliability processes.
JW: New materials and techniques of manufacture. Integration of software and hardware into reliability calculations and the effect of interconnected devices.
GB: Active monitoring of product usage to determine maintenance and replacement schedules on an as required basis.
SM: The determination of reliability through virtual validation (i.e. digital twins) to minimise, or even negate, the use of hardware testing.
JP: Growth of connected products – this could allow us to harvest much more usage and reliability data from our in market products, helping us to continue to improve our designs and reliability.
Asset Management: Designing for Reliability takes place on 26 March 2019 at One Birdcage Walk in London. Join this seminar to:
- Hear from asset management, design and reliability specialists from organisations across engineering sectors including ROSEN Group, Sellafield Ltd, Rotork Controls, Airbus Helicopters UK, Caterpillar Defense, Dyson, Rolls-Royce, Network Rail and more
- Learn how achieving clear definitions of life cycle conditions, loads and costs, can assist in saving costs and man-hours, reduce maintenance needs and guarantee safety
- Address challenges in capturing data in context, and using trending data to measure design robustness
- Build upon and improve existing design and strategies for whole life cycle costs
- Take part in interactive discussions during our roundtable sessions focusing in on key challenges relating to designing for reliability.
To book your place, please visit www.imeche.org/assetmanagement.