Data Sources for Reliability Design Analysis

Abstract

Quantified reliability assessment is now employed by many organizations in the process industries. The objective is to identify critical areas in the plant where design changes are required to meet the safety or production specification. Mechanical system assessment is, however, frequently inhibited by the lack of representative equipment reliability data. Where these data are not available in-house recourse must be made to generic sources from the public domain. Members of the Process Industries Division's Mechanical Reliability Committee have recently completed a study to identify and evaluate the principal reliability data sources for use in process system assessments. This paper discusses the data requirements for reliability assessment and the use of these generic data to provide best-estimates of the reliability statistics for specific applications.