The Need for Reliability Concepts in the Engineering Design Curricula

The reliability of products plays an important role in our daily purchasing decisions and in the international marketing of goods. And as more products are being imported than ever before, we are suffering from unprecedented trade deficits. We no longer can pretend that we are competitive in the international marketplace and ignore the perceived lack of reliability of US products. Unfortunately, reliability engineering has received little or no attention within the academic community. As a consequence, engineering students are not equipped with the necessary skills that are required to design reliable products. Dearly the academic community has a mandate to begin teaching these reliability concepts. This paper investigates the need for the integration of reliability concepts throughout the undergraduate curricula. The electrical and mechanical engineering programs will be used as an example.