Product Safety: Understanding Failure Risk Through Redundancy

Understanding Failure Risk

Failure risk is a critical consideration in engineering, representing the likelihood that a component or system will fail under specific conditions. In this simulation, each joint's failure probability is derived from its stress-strain curve, which plots the relationship between applied stress and resulting strain until material yield occurs.

By adjusting the stress slider, you can simulate various loading scenarios on the fastener joints, observing how their failure probabilities change accordingly. This helps in understanding the threshold at which components might fail.

The Role of Redundancy

Redundancy is a strategy used to ensure system reliability by including additional components or systems that can take over if primary ones fail. In this simulation, you can add backup fasteners per joint using the redundancy slider, which demonstrates how these backups reduce overall system-level risk.

By comparing different materials and varying the number of redundant joints, you can see how each factor influences the FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) risk priority number, a key metric in assessing potential failures.

Stress-Strain Curves

A stress-strain curve is a graphical representation of the mechanical properties of a material under load. It shows how much a material deforms (strain) as it is subjected to increasing force (stress). In this simulation, each joint's failure probability is directly related to its position on the stress-strain curve.

By switching between materials like aluminum, steel, and brittle polymer, you can observe how different materials respond differently under similar loading conditions, highlighting the importance of material selection in design.

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

FMEA is a systematic process used to identify potential failures in a product or system. It helps engineers evaluate the severity, occurrence, and detection of each failure mode, leading to prioritization of actions needed to mitigate these risks.

In this simulation, you can adjust the severity, detection, and redundancy factors to see how they impact the FMEA risk priority number (RPN). This RPN is a product of three factors: Severity, Occurrence, and Detection, providing a quantitative measure for prioritizing improvements.

Frequently asked questions

Try it live

Everything above runs in your browser — open Product Safety: Failure Risk & Redundancy Lab (2D) and change the parameters while it is running. Nothing is installed, nothing is uploaded, the whole model lives in one tab.