ABSTRACT
Poor quality control adversely affects the reliability of a product, but good quality control cannot improve it. Either reliability is designed into the product in the first place or it will not be there. This chapter covers areas of design for reliability, testing for reliability and other related issues. A reliability engineering approach to factors of safety will show that there is a rational approach to such matters. In many cases, the strength of a component and the load applied to it are not constants but vary according to statistical distribution. One technique to eliminate in-service failures is to apply a proof load to a population of new items. The value of the proof load should be the maximum value of the load distribution. This eliminates weak items from the inventory and hopefully ensures that in-service reliability will not be compromised.
