Reliability Engineering

10Failure Modes, Mechanisms, and Effects Analysis

This chapter presents a methodology called failure modes, mechanisms, and effects analysis (FMMEA), used to identify potential failures modes, mechanisms, and their effects. FMMEA enhances the value of failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) by identifying the “high priority failure mechanisms” to help create an action plan to mitigate their effects. The knowledge about the cause and consequences of mechanisms found through FMMEA helps in efficient and cost-effective product development. The application of FMMEA for an electronic circuit board assembly is described in the chapter.

10.1 Development of FMMEA

The competitive market places demands on manufacturers to look for economic ways to improve the product development process. In particular, the industry has been interested in an efficient approach to understand potential product failures that might affect product performance over time. Some organizations are either using or requiring the use of a technique called FMEA to achieve this goal, but most of these companies are not completely satisfied with this methodology.

FMEA was developed as a formal methodology in the 1950s at Grumman Aircraft Corporation, where it was used to analyze the safety of flight control systems for naval aircrafts. From the 1970s through the 1990s, various military and professional society standards and procedures were written to define and ...