Reliability, Maintainability and Safety

The RMS group at Fairchild Controls is responsible for ensuring that our designs are sufficiently robust to satisfy our customers need for equipment that is life cycle cost-effective without sacrificing operator, maintainer, or system safety. Over a life cycle, the most efficient means of producing equipment of high reliability, effective maintainability, and overall safety is through integration of the RMS engineering function into the design team. Testing is performed on the equipment to verify the RMS features, while field data monitoring enables Fairchild Controls to implement a continuous improvement program

Reliability

Fairchild Controls implements a tailored reliability program for each project. Typical activities involved are:

• Analysis
  • Reliability Block Diagrams/Redundancy Modeling
  • Reliability Predictions
  • Fairchild Controls draws from several data sources to perform reliability assessments in the following order of precedence:
    • Field Experience of same or similar equipment
    • Life Test Data
    • Analytical Models (MIL-HDBK-217)
    • Government/Industry Databases (NPRD-95)
  • Failure Modes and Effects/Criticality Analyses (FMEA/FMECA)
    • Fairchild Controls typically performs FMEAs based on MIL-STD-1629.
  • Field Data Analysis
    • A closed loop failure reporting and corrective action system (FRACAS) is in place for all equipment that we make. This system is an integral part of our ISO-9001 and AS9100 quality systems.
  • Derating Analysis
• Testing
  • Reliability Acceptance Test (RAT)
  • Reliability Development and Growth Test (RDGT)
  • Highly Accelerated Life Test (HALT)
  • Environmental Stress Screening (ESS)
  • Highly Accelerated Stress Screening (HASS)
  • Thermal Screening Test
  • Vibration Screening Test (Sine Sweep)

Maintainability

Sustaining high levels of maintainability can be realized only through the continued application of rigorous maintainability techniques. These are applied through all program phases and especially during the design effort to achieve these objectives:

• Optimize fault detection/isolation and repair.
• Provide ease of maintenance actions at all maintenance levels.
• Provide rapid, positive recognition of failures, malfunctions, or degraded performance.
• Minimize maintenance task complexity.
• Provide optimum accessibility to connectors, test points, and mounting hardware.
• Minimize the number and types of tools and test equipment.
• Provide maximum safety for maintenance personnel.
• Provide maximum protection for the equipment in case of failure.

Our capabilities include:

• Prediction
  • Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR)
  • Availability
• Equipment Testability
  • FMECA – Maintainability
  • Testability Analysis
  • Built In Test Development & Analysis
• Testing
  • MTTR Demonstration
  • BITDemonstration
• Reliability Centered Maintenance
• Human Factors Assessment

Safety

Standard guidelines used by Fairchild Controls include MIL-STD-882, MIL-STD-1472, and MIL-STD-454 to identify, track, and eliminate hazards. Personnel and system safety is of prime concern in the design and development of the equipment. The responsibility for assuring inherent equipment safety lies with the assigned reliability engineer. We have implemented the following:

• Safety Assessment
• System Hazard Analysis
  • Fault Tree Analysis and FMEA
  • Hazard Mitigation Design
• Operational Hazard Analysis
• DO-254 Hardware Assurance Program
• Radiation Analysis
  • Single-Event Effects
  • Battlefield Effects