Risk Assessment, 2nd Edition

8 Failure Mode and Effects Analysis

Georgi Popov¹ and Bruce Lyon²

¹ University of Central Missouri

² Brown & Brown

OBJECTIVES

• Introduction, Overview, and Background
• Purpose and Use
• Practical Application
• Examples
• Practice Exercises/Questions

8.1 Introduction

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is one of the most commonly used techniques for hazard analysis and risk assessment. As its name implies, FMEA is used to identify and analyze the ways in which system components can fail to fulfill their designed intent, and the resulting effects to the system. To state plainly, FMEA focusses on failures and their effects to understand how each failure can be prevented and their effects reduced. It is generally considered a qualitative or semiquantitative method that lists systematically the failure modes, their effects, existing safeguards, and any additional controls that are needed to reduce risk to an acceptable level.

Traditionally, the FMEA method has been used as a form of “reliability” analysis of systems, subsystems, processes, and hardware. However, FMEA can also be used to analyze jobs and individual tasks, to identify potential deviations from desired performance criteria that can cause failures (exposure to hazards), how these failures can occur, and their resulting effect on the workers, as well as the work environment. This chapter will address the practical use of the FMEA technique in identifying failure modes and their effects, existing control measures, ...