What’s on your Christmas list? Instead of relying on Santa, here are some gifts you can expect from a SIL 3 compliant process:
- 12 safety requirements improved through review by test engineers
- 11 validation tests that uncovered problems before they reached the field
- 10…
- by John Yozallinas, CFSE
- Friday, November 04, 2016
- Functional Safety
Back to the Future?
At 7am, my personal robot (I call him ‘Jake’) turns on the bedroom lights to 50% brightness and waits for my body to recognize the onset of morning. If I take longer than 5 minutes, Jake will begin to play some soft music. This is usually enough to get…
- by Jonathan Moore
- Tuesday, October 01, 2024
- Functional Safety
FMEA Evolution – Has the essence of FMEA been lost?
Has your FMEA entered the realm of the paperwork exercise that we force ourselves to do for no real reason than someone says we must do it?
I have enjoyed analysis using FMEA. I first learned it existed when I was working for Ford. FMEA was the first Ford…
- by Dr. William Goble, CFSE
- Tuesday, September 24, 2024
- Functional Safety
FMEA Mistakes
I find YouTube to be a good source of information on many subjects. Want to know how to fix a widget? There are probably a few videos on that exact subject. Technical subjects are also there. I was searching on “FMEA” and found an interesting looking video on the “Read More...
- by Patrick O'Brien
- Wednesday, January 12, 2022
- Functional Safety
Machinery Hazards and Risk Assessment Techniques
Machinery related hazards continue to result in hundreds of deaths and thousands of serious injuries each year. In 2019, 2,963 deaths occurred in the construction, transportation and warehousing, agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and manufacturing industries in the United States1. Additionally, serious injuries continue to pose a major challenge…
- by John Yozallinas, CFSE
- Thursday, February 16, 2017
- Functional Safety
So what does Interference-Free mean? And why do we care?
An Interference-Free component, either as an interface or a defined functional area, is a system component that is neither safety critical (C3) nor safety relevant (C2), but interfaces with such subsystems.
If a component has been shown to be interference free (C1), then it has been demonstrated that no…
- by Dr. William Goble, CFSE
- Thursday, August 15, 2024
- Certification
The value of RPN Numbers in a DFMEA
I learned about the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) process for designs some decades ago. I was Supervisor of an Embedded System development group. There seemed to be a lot of evidence that an FMEA on a design was a really good way to identify issues (problems) early…
- by Dr. William Goble, CFSE
- Tuesday, May 12, 2020
- Functional Safety
What’s inside a COVID-19 Ventilator?
At exida, we just finished a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) on a medical ventilator. This was done for a new manufacturer who needed independent design verification. It was a fascinating job. We found lots of pneumatic devices very similar if not identical to the kind used in…