Reliability Assessment of a Cement Industry by Application of Weibull Method

Abstract

The financial cost of downtime can be very significant, especially in manufacturing industries. As a result, no business wants to experience downtime. In this study, the reliability of two identical machines code named GDA and GDB used in a cement manufacturing industry was assessed by analysis of failure times data of components in the machines by applying Weibull distribution method. The estimates of the Weibull parameters, θ and β were obtained using a reliability software tool ‘Windchill Quality Solutions 11.0 Tryout’ and the mean time to failure, failure rate and reliability of the machines was successfully determined. The result obtained showed that, the machines are undergoing rapid wear out as the values of the shape parameter obtained were greater than four. The plots of the failure rate also showed that the machines are in their wear out periods as the failure rate curves were observed to be increasing. The values of the mean time to failure of the two machines were found to be very close. The reliability of the machines was found to be increasing as their values of scale parameter, θ increases with machine GDA having the highest reliability.