Functional Approach of FMEA – A Concept for Safety of Space Vehicles

摘要

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is an established technique used in many industries to evaluatereliability and safety of system design through its life cycle. The methodology of today’s FMEA is almost identicalto what was more than 30 years ago and makes little use of the progress made in computer technology.FMEA’s primary contribution is in the early detection of all failure modes so that design can be modified to mitigatethe hazards during the early stages of development while the cost of change is comparatively low. The currentmanual method of developing FMEA takes too long, and in most cases design gets close to completion beforeFMEA is available. At that stage even if FMEA detects potential hazards in the design, it becomes costly to changedesign. As a result, only minor corrections are implemented to reduce the impact of risk and justifying the hazardretention rationale. This problem may be eliminated by applying computer based methodology.Any system is made up of components that are featured in other systems, e.g. valves, pumps, switches, capacitorsetc. It is the configuration that makes a system unique. The failure characteristics of many of these components arealready known from tests conducted on other systems/space engines. It is possible to store these data in retrievabledatabases. For a new engine, several important functions can be established simply by defining the systemconfiguration. This functional approach has the advantage that the failure analysis can begin with conceptual designwithout having to wait for the detailed hardware parts list. This paper presents the feasibility of such a system.