Reliability and availability (Part 1: Introduction)
Reliability and availability are crucial characteristics of drive systems and every downtime negatively impacts the productivity and profitability of a plant. In this series we would like to walk through the topic, provide some (theoretical) background and also a more practical approach. We have found out that there is a great confusion around reliability, especially when it comes to Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) figures. Hopefully we can bring a bit more light into this topic.
So how can you achieve high reliability of your system? What are the key factors having major impact? How to specify a reliable system? What does MTBF tell us? How is MTBF calculated? Is high MTBF a guarantee for a reliable system? Why are the figures from the vendors so much different? And does it actually make sense to compare them?
Follow our series and figure out the (maybe surprising) answers!
