1 grife - sandia blade rca presentation

1. BLADE RCA PANEL
Sandia Blade Conference 2016

2. BLADE RCA’S
Why do we do an RCA?
- Acute business need (determination of liability)
- Insurance or Warrantee Coverage
- General understanding of failures to assess risk
- Trend failures and or inform inspections
- Develop a correction action (control or hardware change)

3. RCA ELEMENTS
RCA’s Usually look something like this…
• Failed Component Investigation (Usually in Field)
• Lab analysis (are there standard tests that make sense?)
• Analysis of Operational Data Combined with Field Inspection
and Lab Results

4. THE USUAL SUSPECTS
MFG
Defect
Transport
Damage
Guilty until proven innocent?

5. CHALLENGES
§ Identifying Failure Mode
• Failed blades may be in multiple pieces
• Heavy and cumbersome
• Structural elements hidden under the gel coat
• Follow on damage can be larger than precipitating
failure
§ Identifying the root cause(s) – or – Causal
Factors
• Not clear what best RC tools are…(prefer cause-effect
diagrams)
• Clarity on RC requirements (many times only
question is ForceMajeure.)
This part
appearsmore
matureon
drivetrain

6. RON’S IDEAL WORLD
1. Methodical (repeatable) approach to inspection and teardown
with consistent documentation approach
2. Clear expectations of what lab tests can be done to answer
questions about material quality, material damage, etc.
3. Robust Root Cause Analysis method that works for blade
investigations (not a fan of fishbones)