This paper discusses Coulomb failure criteria for brittle deformation of intact rock and fault gouge. Data are presented from laboratory experiments designed to identify the critical gouge layer thickness required to effect a transition from the standard Coulomb criterion to a modified failure law (referred to as Coulomb plasticity) appropriate for simple shear of a gouge layer. Experiments wer...

In equipment monitoring and diagnostics, it is very important to distinguish between a sensor failure and a system failure. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive methodology based on a hybrid system of AI and statistical techniques. The methodology is designed for monitoring complex equipment systems, which validates the sensor data, associates a degree of validity with each measurement, is...

A methodology for the development of PM using the modern approaches of FMEA, root-cause analysis, and fault-tree analysis is presented. Applying PM leads to a cost reduction in maintenance and less overall energy expenditure. Implementation of PM is preferable to the present reactive maintenance procedures (still prevalent in Nigeria). 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1 The key analytical and policy question examined in this paper is whether multinational companies and their overseas investment need to be regulated at the national or the international level, in order to address market failures, and to enhance their potential contribution to world welfare. The paper examines two kinds of regulatory regimes: first the current regime and second, a new regime pr...

In the current competitive world, industrial companies seek to manufacture products of higher quality which can be achieved by increasing reliability, maintainability and thus the availability of products. On the other hand, improvement in products lifecycle is necessary for achieving high reliability. Typically, maintenance activities are aimed to reduce failures of industrial machinery and mi...

Most studies of software failures and faul ts have done little more than classifying failures and faults collected f r o m long-term projects. In this paper, we propose a model t o analyze failures and faults f o r debugging purpose. In the model, w e define ‘ ya ihre modes” and “failure types” t o ident i fy t he existence of program failures and the nature of t he program failures, respective...

With modern hardware heading for smaller feature sizes and lower operating voltages, failure rates are expected to increase. Instead of adding hardware to protect against failures, which is expensive and inflexible, one can implement error detection in software. The focus of the present work is the AN encoding scheme. Improvements to code generation are introduced that enable a high level of fa...

Failure prediction methods are becoming sine qua non conditions for effective availability enhancement in complex computer and communication systems. Therefore, there is a growing need for validation, benchmarking and assessment of such methods on real industrial data. Our thesis is that the effectiveness of such methods can be significantly enhanced when combined with fault injection. Then, no...

Failure reproduction and fault isolation are key activities in the post-release phase. As we develop techniques to exploit field data to accelerate and improve these activities, we must be aware of the impact of field data integrity. This work scopes and provides details about a study we are conducting to quantify the impact of users’ contribution and filtering processes in the integrity of fie...

Steam-induced vibration is a kind of self-excited vibration which is one of the most important issues affecting the operation reliability of steam turbines. A lot of actual cases of steam-induced vibration of steam turbine were collected in this work. And steam-induced vibration fault was statistical and classified by fault reason, happened time, occurrence load and fault severity. The statisti...