Prospectus

Activities

The QRE Center covers three coordinated sets of activities that create, evaluate, and disseminate quality and reliability engineering work. Quality Engineering Research refers to the creation of new methods, tools, and approaches for improving quality of products and service. Reliability Engineering Research refers to the development of methods for assessment of components, products, and systems reliabilities for different configurations and operating conditions. Education and Information Transfer activities deliver skills and technical information to students and working professionals. A QRE Center roadmap is attached at Appendix III.

Quality Engineering Research

Quality engineering starts with the planning and development of new products. These products include discrete parts as in electronics, automotive industries, and/or continuous processes as in food, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries. Specifications define the requirements and characteristics of the products. Appropriate quality engineering plans, which contain the necessary procedures, tests, and verification of product quality during the development and production stages, are required. This is achieved via a variety of approaches such as design of experiments, response surface methodology, on-line quality engineering, process monitoring and control, along with sensor data acquisition and computer controls.

The research experience of the faculty of the Center and the industrial experience gained with equipment and systems form bases for further research and development of quality engineering methods.

Reliability Engineering Research

The role of reliability assumed new dimensions in recent years primarily because of global competition and the complexity of large systems and the consequences of their failures. Defense, telecommunications, aviation, space, nuclear power generation, and banking are examples of such systems.

The design of these systems requires assessment of the components’ reliability, investigation of different structures, and configuration and reliability evaluation of its subsystems. The research activities also include accelerated life testing, product degradation models, reliability optimization, reliability growth models, preventive and scheduled maintenance, warranty estimation, software reliability, and design of fault tolerant systems.

The QRE Center has quality and reliability engineering facilities with a wide range of equipment for accelerated stress testing, materials properties, geometric measurements, and sophisticated software developed by the QRE Center personnel to estimate reliability of components operating under different conditions. The Center has access to a device fabrication laboratory and a failure analysis laboratory. (See Equipment, Facilities, and Other Resources).

Faculty

The research and educational activities of the QRE Center are conducted by faculty associated with different disciplines at Rutgers and Arizona State University. The faculty is known for their expertise and extensive contributions to quality and reliability engineering research. Below is a partial listing of faculty from Engineering, Statistics, and Business and Management. Biographical sketches of researchers currently funded by the Center are included at the end of this prospectus.

Susan L. Albin, Rutgers University

Melike Baykal-Gursoy, Rutgers University

David Coit, Rutgers University

Elsayed A. Elsayed, Rutgers University

Norma F. Hubele, Arizona State University

J. Bert Keats, Arizona State University

Regina Y. Liu, Rutgers University

James T. Luxhoj, Rutgers University

Donald L. McCabe, Rutgers University

Douglas C. Montgomery, Arizona State University

Hoang Pham, Rutgers University

George C. Runger, Arizona State University

Zachary Stoumbos, Rutgers University

Highly qualified M.S. and Ph.D. students from both universities support the faculty. There are approximately 30 Ph.D. students who are involved in research related to quality and reliability engineering at the two institutions.

Annually, the Site Directors, with the advice of the IAB, issue a statement of research needs for the Center. These needs are, for the most part, identified by QRE member companies. Research ideas to respond to these needs can come from anyone associated with the Center, but generally the faculty develops proposals from the needs identified by industry members. These ideas are discussed with the IAB members. The Director will issue a request for proposals, reflecting the research needs of the Center.

The IAB may decide to request additional proposals from investigators who have expertise and experience in a particular field of interest to the industrial sponsors. This investigator may or may not be from a university participating in the Center.

The IAB and the Site Directors again evaluate final proposals, and projects are chosen for funding. Research proposals are accepted and chosen for one or more years of research; however, multi-year projects are re-evaluated annually.

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