Failure environment analysis system-MSFC an enhanced tool for hardware reliability in design

At the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Propulsion Lab the need for reliability in design engineering became increasingly important in the early days of the National Launch System (NLS). This need has become significantly more important in subsequent programs. During NLS development, most of the available methods and tools were either inadequate for the required analyses, required the use of multiple tools for a single analysis, and/or were inappropriate for use by design engineers. It was quite apparent that reliability analysis tools were not keeping pace with other design tools such as CAD/CAE, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics or thermal analysis. In addition, the existing reliability analysis tools did not have an interface with any of the other design tools. For these reasons, the need for new methods and tools for conducting reliability analysis was realized. This led the Propulsion Lab to initiate the enhancement of an existing software package to meet their requirements. The results of these enhancement efforts to date represent the Failure Environment Analysis System-MSFC (FEAS-M) software.