50 Rules for Preventing Engineering Failures

The problem with engineering failures is they keep on happening. There’s nothing new about them; most have happened before and their reasons are well understood.

The difficulty is you arrive late to the party. You’re picking up other peoples’ work; mistakes have already been made in design, purchasing, operation and everywhere else, leaving you the legacy to sort out. You do your best, but failures happen, the result of historical reasons and decisions.

Why not kill off failure-inducing rationale and decisions before they cause the problem? You’ll reduce those failures that are well understood but still happen. You’d need rules to work to, and foresight to broaden your viewpoint of where engineering failures are born. There’s lots to consider:

Economics           Factory tests

                    Attitude           Design for inspection

               Ethics           Material choices

          Culture           Benchmarking

          Design life           Operator-proofing

          Purchasing           Equipment ageing

     Multiple events           Human interactions

And many more.

Let’s shrink them down to the most important 50? Those with superlative general application, squeeze each to a few pages and call them something snappy like … Rules of Thumb? It’s a massive call.

They’re from lessons learned
Our 50 rules are drawn from real failures and disasters, taking you straight to the principles that are proven failure-causes. Don’t get involved in engineering design, specification, projects or purchasing until you’ve checked out the 50 rules in this book. They could prevent future failures.