Fundamentals of Design for Reliability

Reliability engineering treats failure as a statistical phenomenon you can predict, design against, and verify rather than something you hope to avoid, and this graduate course gives you the probabilistic toolkit (Weibull, exponential, bathtub curves) along with the engineering discipline (FMEA, fault trees, derating, HALT/ALT testing, MIL-STD-810) to actually do it. Expect homework sets on distributions and reliability block diagrams, case studies ranging from IKEA to the JAL 123 crash, two midterms, and a final, with individual assignments built around real failure modes. It sits at the intersection of design, statistics, and quality assurance, so it is the natural follow-on for anyone heading into aerospace, defense, nuclear, or any industry where a part breaking is more than an inconvenience.