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| The Weibull Team and Associates |
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When I retired from Pratt & Whitney Aircraft
in 1987 to teach Weibull analysis, I missed the daily interaction and
support from the superb statisticians in my RMS department. People like
Jim Breneman, Barbara Ringhiser, Chuck Medlin and Grant Reinman played key
roles in developing Weibull methods that were the leading edge of the
technology. It was daunting to suddenly lose their research capabilities.
Much to my amazement the "Weibull Team" developed within months of my
retirement supported by many engineers and statisticians that volunteered
their help. Here I would like to introduce the Team and some of our most
important associates. I treasure their support and friendship and we owe
them for the many improvements in our methodology.
Some of Our Weibull Associates: We have had so much help from so many it is hard to make a list, impossible to describe all their contributions, or even name all of them. The few that are included here are particularly noteworthy, engineers and statisticians that we are honored to be associated with.
He is a most interesting person as he has many interests like the oriental game Go, and ballroom dancing, especially Tango,. parachute jumping, bull fighting, gourmet cooking, and of course, statistics. He loves Mexico and Argentina where he often lectures, He has been elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1973), the American Society for Quality Control (1983), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1988). He worked for General Electric for 23 years and developed a Weibull software program that was similar to the program we developed at Pratt & Whitney. As far as I know these were the only Weibull programs that correctly regressed X on Y, not Y on X until very recently. Both were made available to the public. Dr. Nelson authored three books which I recommend:
He is at (518) 346-5138 and WNconsult@AOL.com.
His great contribution to the Handbook is the logic diagram in Chapter 10. This summarizes all the best practices in the handbook and will lead you quickly to the most appropriate method for your particular data. This has been so useful Wes has incorporated into the SuperSMITH help menu. He has over thirty years experience in quality and reliability engineering. He is currently the Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) Master Black Belt in the PACCAR Corporate Quality Department. He provides hands-on help and training to all PACCAR divisions in statistical methods, quality and reliability engineering.
He has make many contributions to The Handbook and software. He was first to discover my Critical Correlation Coefficients are Weibull distributed and he produced the CCC plot in Chapter 3. He also developed the median ranks in Appendix H but his most valuable research is in analyzing mixtures of failure modes. He spent years developing the YBATH software that will try to separate up to three mixtures of failure modes and estimate the batch size if a batch is present in the data. YBATH is now included in the SuperSMITH software. Carl continues to assist Wes Fulton with improved mathematical routines for SuperSMITH. Carl has a BSME from Montana State University, and an MBA from the University of Michigan – Flint. He is a registered Professional Engineer in Michigan. He has 3 patents and 2 defensive publications to his credit. Carl has published 2 SAE papers (in 1999)
related to Weibull. One of them describes the classification and analysis
of Weibull Mixtures. The other describes the critical correlation
coefficient necessary for a good fit. This paper can be downloaded from
the Delphi web site:
Todd's Ph.D is in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Illinois with postgraduate research at the Sandia National Laboratories. Previously he was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at the Motorola Corporation where he became a Six-Sigma Black-Belt. He was an adjunct professor at the Mesa Community College teaching chemistry. Todd has taught Reliability emphasizing Weibull at both Motorola and Micron. I first met Todd at the RAC "Learn from the Experts" in Cooperstown, New York around 1995. We are indebted to him for his significant contributions to Weibull analysis. He lives with his wife and three children in the mountains outside of Boise, ID. Papers, Patents and Presentations:
Jim Abernethy (Scuba-Adventures.com), Dr. Bob's son, providing scuba diving in the Palm Beaches as well as Shark and Dolphin diving in the Bahamas. Robert M. Baldwin is the current webmaster for this website, and Bob Abernethy's grandson. His websites can be found at VeganBob.com and CSBob.com, providing website design and software development. |
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Wes
Fulton is the better half of the
original Weibull Team. In 1987 Wes was a design project engineer at
Garrett in Los Angeles. He had been assigned to their RMS group and
volunteered to develop computer software based on our US Air Force Weibull
Analysis Handbook. He had permission to market what he called "WinSMITH
Weibull." An engineer from the Eaton Corporation showed me the product.
The software in the USAF Handbook was most unfriendly and Wes’s product
was just the opposite. I flew to Los Angeles immediately and we formed the
Weibull Team with a handshake. For the first few years Wes used his free
time to improve WSW while I prayed he would be fired or laid off from
Garrett. He finally took early retirement and I was delighted to share our
research with him as he is way ahead of me in heavy math and numerical
analysis. Every method in The New Weibull Handbook is incorporated in the
SuperSMITH software. I blame Wes for making me update the Handbook at
almost every printing to catch up with his research incorporated in
SuperSMITH. His work has revolutionized the Weibull Workshop; his friendly
software removing the drudgery, and allowing the students hands-on
experience with his "Playtime" computer tutorial. I am indebted to Wes for
the world’s best Weibull software and for his many research triumphs like
correcting the likelihood function for small samples, pivotal confidence
bounds, and his advancements in substantiation and accelerated testing. He
now produces my Weibull Workshops in addition to programming the software
and doing much of the research. He is a really nice guy and a pleasure to
work with! Wes can be reached at 310-548-6358 Pacific Time. His website is
Paul
Barringer joined the Weibull Team
over a decade ago. He specializes in the petro-chemical industries and is
their leading expert for reliability, maintainability, safety, life cycle
costs, and production process control, which he developed. Before joining
the team he was Director of Engineering and Manufacturing for the Hydril
Corporation. He has made many contributions to The New Weibull Handbook
and the software development. Much of our knowledge of the Crow-AMSAA
modeling and uncertainties we owe to Paul. Perhaps his most significant
breakthrough was the development of production process control using
Weibull methods. He now travels the world lecturing and consulting for
Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Eastman Chemical and so many
others. He is a joy to listen to as he truly has a silver tongue. He is
author of the basic training courses
Wayne
Nelson is the world’s greatest
mathematical statistician in life data analysis in my opinion. He has
helped Wes Fulton and I in our research many times over the years. He was
the Keynote Speaker for our first Weibull User Conference in 1994. He has
worked with Wes on the SuperSMITH accelerated testing methodology. He
joins Wes, Paul and I lecturing together for Clarion seminars in Houston,
Texas in the spring. His three books are the references I use most. You
will find an appendix on his graphical repair analysis in The New Weibull
Handbook. He is the only person that sends me a hand drawn original
Christmas card each year! 
Bob
Rock was the star student in my
first Weibull Workshop for PACCAR. He now teaches Weibull with Wes Fulton
at SAE’s annual International Automotive Congress, replacing me. I do not
attribute all of his current success to the several Weibull Workshops he
has attended!
Carl
Tarum is a Senior Statistical
Engineer at Delphi, with 20 years experience in engineering, validation,
reliability, customer satisfaction, and manufacturing. He is certified as
a Robust Engineering Practitioner, Six Sigma Black Belt, and Shainin Red X
Journeyman®. He is working on his DFSS (Design for Six Sigma) Master Black
Belt.
Geoff
Cole is pictured here with his
wife. (Photo by me on my last visit to Rolls Royce.) Geoff is the
reliability modeling expert at Rolls Royce, Bristol. He developed the
state-of-the art analysis for batch problems in data sets, the Aggregated
Cumulative Hazard method, (ACH). This technology provides a graphic
display of the batch and an estimate of the batch size. He authored
Appendix F in the Handbook on this subject. Wes Fulton has incorporated
the "ACH" method in the SuperSMITH software. There have been many
applications showing the sensitivity of this method identifying the batch.
Chi
Chao Liu was awarded his PhD at
the University of Nottingham for his thesis, completing the largest and
perhaps the most important study of life data analysis methods. He
simulated thousands of data sets with and without all kinds of suspensions
and evenly split between the Weibull and Log Normal distributions. He
arrived at three conclusions: (1) Overall Median Rank Regression is
recommended over Maximum Likelihood estimates; (2) among all measures of
goodness of fit, the likelihood ratio test and the "P" value of the
correlation coefficient squared (the coefficient of determination) are the
two best choices; and (3) for small numbers of failures, 20 or less, the
two parameter Weibull distribution should always be used. He was a colonel
in the Taiwanese Army but is now a dean at a college in Taipei. The photo
was taken in Taipei when Dr. Liu provided assistance and translations
Chinese during my Weibull Workshop. His thesis may be downloaded from
Ronald Shop
is the senior Reliability Engineer for DAF Trucks in The Netherlands. He
has inspired research in Crow-AMSAA and pioneered life data analysis at
DAF. Ronald kindly translated Barnard’s paper on median ranks into English
from the original Dutch. He produces our Weibull Workshops several times a
year in Holland. Barnard’s paper may be downloaded from
Todd Marquart is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff of the Micron Technology Corporation. He has made major contributions to our research over the past several years. His study of our grouped and inspection interval data methods ranked them from most accurate to least accurate as interval MLE, Probit and the Inspection Option, respectively. His results are in a hallmark paper that may be downloaded from this website. His recent research is on comparisons of Weibayes methods and we expect another hallmark paper on this subject shortly.