One important measure of performance for a repairable system is steady-state availability. In this paper, a method to estimate and establish confidence interval for the steady-state availability under Weibull lifetime and lognormal repair time distributions is proposed. Also, bias and mean squared error of a point estimator for an availability are investigated. In addition, a procedure to derive the sample size and critical value for availability demonstration test is presented and illustrated with a numerical example.

A colloidal silica slurry has been manufactured by mixing nano silica powders having different grain size to improve the reliability of Sapphire wafer CMP process. The main reliability problem of CMP process such as the breaking of wafer can be prevented by reducing the size of particles in a slurry. While existing commercial colloidal silica slurries are usually made of single grain size silica powder of about 120nm, in the present study 40nm and 100nm silica powders are mixed to achieve a similar removal rate. The new colloidal silica slurry showed wafer removal rate of $3.04{\mu}m/120min$ while that of a commercial colloidal silica slurry was $3.03{\mu}m/120min$. The roughness was less than $4{\AA}$ and scratch was 0. It is also expected that the reduction of the size of nano silica particles can improve the dispersion stability and prolong the useful life of the slurry.

This paper presents an accelerated life test to estimate the lifetime of thermoelectric module for home water purifier. Clamping force and thermal cycle are selected as accelerating variables through the technical review about failure mechanism. It is assumed that its lifetime follows weibull distribution. The relationship, acceleration factor, and BP life at design condition are estimated by analyzing the accelerated life test data.

To improve the reliability of a weapon system, we perform the activities: setting the target reliability, reliability allocation, and reliability management, etc. Before starting weapon system development, the target reliability of system is set through advanced research and is allocated to its subsystems at the beginning of development. Then we manage the reliability of system and subsystems to meet the target reliability until completion of system development. In this paper, we research representative reliability allocation methods and introduce the suitable reliability allocation method followed by its application to the underwater guided weapon system. The purpose of this research is to review the proposed reliability allocation techniques and find an appropriate method for underwater weapon systems followed by the validation of its application.

This paper deals with a design of observer based fault detection filter for a boiler-turbine control system. The goal is to present a method for rapid sensor fault detection in order to enhance the reliability of boiler-turbine operation in the thermal power plant. Our fault detection filter can be designed via solutions of linear matrix inequalities. In order to demonstrate the efficacy of our design method, numerical simulations are provided.

Thermal shock tests at two stress levels were performed to see the life (cycles) of LPF ASSY (low pass filter assembly) at normal stress level. In this case Coffin-Manson relationship is generally used to describe the relationship between the temperature difference and the life, together with the Weibull distribution describing the life at each stress level. So for given data Coffin-Manson is fitted to predict the life at normal stress level. However, different types of models are appropriate for this type of test. Hence, a more appropriate model such as General log-linear model which can also incorporate the duration at the highest and lowest temperatures and acceleration time will be introduced.

In the fields of reliability application, the most commonly used test methods for reliability demonstration are zero-failure acceptance tests since they require fewer test samples and less test time compared to other test methods that guarantee the same reliability with a given confidence level. For products with lognormal lifetime distribution, the value of scale parameter is usually assumed to be known in designing reliability demonstration tests. It is important to select correct values of scale parameters to guarantee the specified reliability with given confidence level exactly. The effect of using wrong values of scale parameters in designing reliability demonstration test for products with lognormal lifetime distribution is examined and selecting proper values of scale parameters for conservative reliability demonstration is discussed.

The requirements of reliability verification for new products and technology are increasing more and more in accordance with the trend of climate change prevention and GHG reduction technology, functional skills. SCA(Swirl Control Actuator) is the important part of a car intake manifold system. This device generates swirl that is mixing the fuel and air into the engine combustion chamber. This is to improve output for engine and reduce the emission for exhaust. In this article reliability assessment criteria for swirl control actuator for automobiles are established in terms of basic HALT and life time test.

In the mechanical design process various types of errors are bound to occur. In order to prevent such mechanical malfunctions and decrease number of instances of errors, various technique are utilized. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the combined service Blueprint and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) by applying such method to machine process. The results are as follows: First, modification can be obtained by discovering the failure mode hidden within the inner side of the blueprint. Second, issues within the company are found when conducting the machine design process that is not visible from the outside. Therefore, potential errors can be effectively resolved by preventing failure mode in advance and eventually high quality of the product could be obtained as well as its reliability.

The IEC 61508 standard was established to specify the functional safety of E/E/PE safety-related systems. Safety life cycle to provide the framework and direction for the application of IEC 61508 is included in this standard. In this paper, we describe overviews, objects, scopes, requirements and activities of each phase in safety life cycle. In addition, we introduce safety integrity level(SIL) which is used for verifying the safety integrity requirements of E/E/PE system and perform a case study to estimate hardware SIL by FMEDA. The SIL is evaluated by two criteria. One of them is the architectural constraints which restrict the maximum SIL by combination of SFF and HFT. The other is the probability of failure which is classified into PFD and PFH based on frequency of demand and calculated by safe or dangerous failure rates.