ME4751 Combat Survivability, Reliability and Systems Safety Engineering

This course provides the student with an understanding of the essential elements in the study of survivability, reliability and systems safety engineering for military platforms including submarines, surface ships, fixed-wing and rotary wing aircraft, as well as missiles, unmanned vehicles and satellites. Technologies for increasing survivability and methodologies for assessing the probability of survival in a hostile (non-nuclear) environment from conventional and directed energy weapons will be presented. Several in-depth studies of the survivability various vehicles will give the student practical knowledge in the design of battle-ready platforms and weapons. An introduction to reliability and system safety engineering examines system and subsystem failure in a non-hostile environment. Safety analyses (hazard analysis, fault-tree analysis, and component redundancy design), safety criteria and life cycle considerations are presented with applications to aircraft maintenance, repair and retirement strategies, along with the mathematical foundations of statistical sampling, set theory, probability modeling and probability distribution functions.

Prerequisite

Consent of Instructor

Lecture Hours

4

Lab Hours

1

Course Learning Outcomes

At the completion of the course students will be able to:

• Describe the six survivability enhancement concepts for susceptibility reduction and vulnerability reduction and give at least one example of a feature for each concept.
• Explain the Doppler phenomenon; determine a target’s radial velocity, the maximum unambiguous velocity, and blind speeds; and describe MTI and pulse-Doppler radars.
• Compute the J/S and RB for self-screening jamming.
• Describe how to reduce the RCS of an aircraft and explain the ways that radar absorbent material absorbs the impinging radar signal.
• Compute an aircraft’s single-hit vulnerable area for a combat system with non-redundant, redundant, non-overlapping, and overlapping critical components.
• Determine the probability that a combat system is killed when hit by more than one penetrator using the binomial, Poisson, tree diagram, and simplified approach.
• Conduct a survivability trade study on a combat aircraft, ship, or ground vehicle.