Reliability Engineering: A Life Cycle Approach

Updated throughout for the second edition, Reliability Engineering: A Life Cycle Approach draws on the author’s global industry experience to demonstrate the invaluable role reliability engineers play in the entire life cycle of a plant.

Applicable to both high-cost, cutting-edge plants and to plants operating under serious budget constraints, this textbook uses a practical approach to cover the theory of reliability engineering, alongside the design, operation, and maintenance required in a plant. This textbook has been updated to cover the modern standards of maintenance practice, most notably the ISO 55 000 standards. It also covers linear programming, failure analysis, financial management, and analysis. This textbook refers to case studies throughout.

This textbook will be of interest to students and engineers in the field of reliability, mechanical, manufacturing, and industrial engineering. It will also be relevant to automotive and aerospace engineers.

Dr Edgar Bradley is a consultant specialising in reliability engineering and related topics.

His qualifications include a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Akron, Ohio, USA, as well as an MBA from Cranfield University in the UK and a PhD from North West University.

He completed his compulsory military service in the Technical Services Corps of the South African Army, being discharged with the rank of major.

He was formerly employed by Eskom, the South African power utility, including 11 years as a project engineer before becoming a reliability specialist. He has also worked for mechanical contracting firms as a project and design engineer and has 50 years of industrial experience in project management, benchmarking, RAM engineering, power plant, pipework engineering, cryogenics, and plant maintenance.

For more than 40 years, he has also served as a part-time lecturer in the Engineering Faculty at the University of the Witwatersrand, lecturing and developing courses on the MSc programme on, inter alia, project management, reliability engineering, maintenance engineering, industrial marketing, and systems engineering. He has also lectured at the University of Pretoria, at Northwest University, and at the Namibian University of Science and Technology.

He is a registered professional engineer and a member of the South African Institute of Industrial Engineers. He was also twice president of the Southern African Maintenance Association (SAMA--now SAAMA).

In 2016, he authored this book, Reliability Engineering: A Life Cycle Approach, published by CRC/Taylor and Francis in the USA, now in its second edition.