Pecht to Deliver IEEE Keynote

Michael Pecht, chair professor and director of The Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE), will be the keynote speaker at the 46th annual IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium on April 29 in Phoenix. His address, “A New Approach to Qualification Testing,” confronts the fact that over the past 10 years there have been an increasingly large number of products that have passed qualification tests, but have failed in the field. The resulting costs of these failures have been in the billions of dollars for many companies.

In the address Dr. Pecht will introduce prognostics as a process of assessing the extent of deviation or degradation of a product from its expected normal operating conditions, and then, based on continuous monitoring, predicting the future reliability of the product. By monitoring key control signals and loads, this data can be used in conjunction with precursor reasoning algorithms and stress-and-damage models to enable prognostics.

This year Pecht was also recognized by the IEEE Reliability Society with a Lifetime Achievement Award granted at the Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium in Las Vegas. The recognition is the highest reliability honor awarded, given to Pecht for his major contributions to the Reliability Society, reliability research and education, and to the reliability community as a whole.

In February, the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology named Pecht a recipient of the 2008 Maurice Simpson Technical Editors Award, along with co-authors Sony Mathew, Diganta Das, Michael Osterman, Robin Ferebee, and Joseph Clayton for their paper "Virtual Remaining Life Assessment of Electronic Hardware Subjected to Shock and Random Vibration Life Cycle Loads." The paper was published in the April 2007 issue of the Journal of the IEST.

Published March 7, 2008