Author Archives: Andrew O'Connor

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About Andrew O'Connor

I'm a shameless promoter of Reliability and Risk Engineering. My career has focused on all facets of asset management including owning and maintaining unit assets, maintenance operations, writing asset management plans, auditing technical regulation, implementation and measurement of asset performance metrics and detailed data analysis in support of capability decisions. I have a Masters in Reliability Engineering and am a PhD Candidate at the University of Maryland, USA. Author of the book "Probability Distributions Used in Reliability Engineering". I am a ASQ-CRE and specialise in MATLAB programming and analysis of CMMS data.

Common Cause Failures

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ImageCommon Cause Failures (CCF) is one of the reasons why a classical reliability model of your system may dangerously underestimate the risk of failure. It directly attacks the benefits of providing redundancy by creating a single point of failure. In fact, studies have shown that CCF events may contribute between 20% – 80% of the unavailability of safety systems within nuclear reactors [Werner 1994]. This post will “Describe this type of  failure (also known as common cause mode failure) and how it affects design for  reliability. (Understand)” [CRE BOK III.A.4] Continue reading →