What is a Failure Mode? The Complete Guide

No matter the field, establishing a clear, measurable, and objective strategy is essential for achieving optimal results. In maintenance and reliability, failure modes serve as a foundation for defining effective preventive and corrective actions.

Understanding how an asset can fail allows organizations to anticipate risks, optimize interventions, and enhance overall equipment performance. This article explores the different types of failure modes, how to detect them, and best practices for managing them effectively.

Definition

A failure mode, also called failure code or symptoms, refers to the specific way in which a component, system, or process fails to perform its intended function. It describes how an asset ceases to function properly and is often identified through its symptoms.

Why It’s Important to Understand Failure Codes

Identifying the Right Preventive Maintenance Tasks for Each Asset:

Understanding failure modes allows maintenance teams to identify the specific tasks that need to be performed on each asset. Knowing what to look for during inspections removes the guesswork and ensures that your preventive maintenance efforts target the most critical assets.

Removing Subjectivity from the Inspection Process:

A key part of maintenance is knowing exactly what to check for during inspections. Failure codes provide clear guidelines on what issues to monitor, making the inspection process more objective.

Understanding Failure Triggers for Proactive Maintenance:

When you understand the underlying causes of failures, it becomes easier to predict when and why a failure might occur. This insight allows you to act before issues escalate, ensuring that equipment stays operational longer and maintenance efforts are more focused.

Optimizing Risk Management with Failure Mode Analysis:

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) provides a structured approach to assessing the risks associated with various failure modes. By analyzing each mode’s occurrence and detection probability, you can prioritize maintenance activities that mitigate the highest risks, ensuring that resources are allocated to the most impactful issues.

Types of Failure Modes

Failure modes can be categorized in a various way, three of them are mechanical, electrical, and chemical failures, each affecting equipment performance and reliability in different ways.

• Mechanical Failure Modes include wear, fatigue, deformation, and misalignment. Wear occurs due to friction or abrasion, leading to material loss and reduced efficiency. Fatigue results from repeated cyclic loading, causing cracks and eventual failure. Deformation happens when excessive force leads to permanent bending or warping, while misalignment increases stress and accelerates wear.
• Electrical Failure Modes involve short circuits, insulation breakdowns, and power surges. Short circuits create excessive current flow, leading to overheating or fire hazards. Insulation breakdowns occur when electrical insulation deteriorates due to heat, moisture, or mechanical stress, resulting in leakage currents. Power surges, often caused by voltage spikes, can damage sensitive electronic components and shorten equipment lifespan.
• Chemical Failure Modes encompass corrosion, contamination, and chemical degradation. Corrosion gradually destroys metals through oxidation or chemical reactions, often accelerated by moisture and aggressive substances. Contamination, such as dust, oil, or chemicals, interferes with normal operation and degrades performance. Chemical degradation occurs when materials break down due to prolonged exposure to harsh chemicals, heat, or UV radiation, leading to brittleness or cracks.

How to Identify Potential Failure

Once a potential failure is recognized, actions can be taken to address the specific failure mode. The following methods play a crucial role in early failure detection and in ensuring that corrective actions are tailored to the exact failure modes.

• Monitoring and Inspections: Regular inspections are essential for identifying abnormalities before they develop into significant failures. By collecting data from maintenance logs and analyzing historical performance trends, organizations can detect early failure patterns. Operators and technicians play a crucial role in visually inspecting equipment for early warning signs such as excessive vibration, temperature changes, or unusual noises.
• Predictive Maintenance Tools : Several advanced tools help in early failure detection. Vibration analysis identifies imbalances, misalignments, and bearing defects before they escalate into major issues. Thermography, using infrared imaging, detects overheating components, which can indicate electrical faults, misalignments, or lubrication problems. Oil analysis helps diagnose issues like excessive friction or improper lubrication by identifying contamination, wear particles, and chemical degradation in lubricants. Ultrasound testing is another valuable technique, capable of detecting leaks, electrical discharge, and mechanical wear that might not be visible to the naked eye.
• Condition-Based Monitoring (CBM): Condition-based monitoring relies on continuous or periodic measurement of key parameters such as temperature, vibration, and fluid quality. IoT-enabled sensors and real-time data analytics enhance the ability to track asset health and predict failures before they occur. This approach enables timely corrective actions, reducing unplanned downtime and optimizing maintenance schedules based on actual equipment conditions.

Failure Mode Identification: Tools and Techniques

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA): FMEA is a systematic approach to identifying, evaluating, and prioritizing potential failure modes in a product or process. By using the Risk Priority Number (RPN), this method assesses the severity, occurrence, and detection of each failure mode, allowing reliability engineers to focus on the most critical risks.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Root cause analysis focuses on identifying the underlying causes of failure modes to prevent recurrence. Techniques such as the 5 Whys, Fishbone Diagrams (Ishikawa), and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) help trace failures back to their root cause.

Preventive Maintenance Optimization (PMO): Preventive maintenance optimization is a structured approach to refining maintenance tasks based on failure mode analysis. It ensures that maintenance activities effectively target failure modes, optimizing resources and reducing unnecessary interventions.

Conclusion

Understanding “What is a Failure Mode” is crucial in asset management and maintenance. It helps to identify specific ways an asset can fail and provides the foundation for proactive strategies that prevent costly downtime and improve reliability.

By recognizing the different types of failure modes and utilizing tools like FMEA, organizations can mitigate risks and optimize maintenance efforts. To ensure long-term asset performance, it’s essential to integrate failure mode analysis into a comprehensive asset strategy that addresses potential failures before they occur.

If you’re interested in learning more about how asset strategies can help optimize your asset management approach, go to our Asset Strategy page.

Raphael Tremblay,
Spartakus Technologies
[email protected]