ME/NucE 460 Reliability Concepts in Design
Course
Description
The course covers materials
reliability in design including mechanical, electrical and system aspects.
Five main topics will be studied. The course starts by introducing
engineering risk and reliability, highlighting its interdisciplinary nature
and its significance in system design. The concept of reliability as a
probability is introduced and the basic laws of probability are reviewed.
The discussion centers on the mathematics needed to understand and analyze
complex systems including components in series and parallel. The topics
include the independence, mutual exclusivity, truth tables and Venn
diagrams. These concepts are then applied to simple systems consisting of
one, two and three components in various configurations. The equivalency of
the various methods is discussed. The effect of maintenance on a system's
reliability is presented along with discussions of various maintenance
strategies. Then, the failure modes and effects analysis is introduced and
examples discussed. The concept of fault trees and event trees and their
application to reliability analysis are presented. Risk analysis is then
introduced as a case study in the application of reliability analysis. A
nuclear power plant system is analyzed to quantify the risk to the public
from its operation.
For more details
see the Course Syllabus.
Current Course
Offering Schedule via C&DE
Summer 2005
Day and Time: T, Th
12:45 - 2:00 pm
Location: 413 Rider
Building II
Start Date:
May 17, 2005
End Date: August
11, 2005
Dr. Stewart Kurtz 
"Reliability
Engineering and Risk Analysis", M. Modarres, Mark Kaminsky, Vasiliy
Krivtsov, Marcel Dekker, NYC, NY 1999.