Application of Reliability Growth Methods in Conjunction with Design for Reliability Framework to Validate Heavy Truck Design

Why field campaigns in the automotive industry have been going up over the years despite the strong development of technical knowledge, computational design tools and techniques to secure higher reliability standards since early stages of development phases?

Uncertainties created by product complexity have been a factor that affects the ability of the manufacturers to prevent design failures before the product launch. Another factor is the shorter product development time, less test time to validate the product means that the new design will not have enough exposure to the real truck application and so some failures may not be able to be detected during the project.

To deal effectively with uncertainties this study shows an application of reliability growth techniques in conjunction with DfR- Design for Reliability framework to validate the truck design in the customer application. The Crow - AMSAA method is applied to measure the reliability growth of the complete vehicle in various stages of product development by using the failure rate intensity. By doing that reliability related failures can be found and fixed during the project to secure the required level of failure rate at SOP.A tool developed in excel has the capability to calculate the confidence level and the demonstrable failure rate at any stage of the project to prove statistically the level of certainty of the results to support the decision-making process during project gates.