The NTSB has released it’s interim report on the Boeing 787 JAL battery fire and it appears that Boeing’s initial safety assessment had concluded that the only way in which a battery fire would eventuate was through overcharging. Continue Reading…
Archives For Scientific Discovery
But, we tested it? Didn’t we?
Earlier reports of the Boeing 787 lithium battery initial development indicated that Boeing engineers had conducted tests to confirm that a single cell failure would not lead to a cascading thermal runaway amongst the remaining batteries. According to these reports their tests were successful, so what went wrong?
Just updated the post Why Safety Integrity Levels Are Pseudo-science with additional reference material and links to where it’s available on the web. Oh, and they’re still pseudo-science…
Did the designers of the japanese seawalls consider all the factors?
In an eerie parallel with the Blayais nuclear power plant flooding incident it appears that the designers of tsunami protection for the Japanese coastal cities and infrastructure hit by the 2011 earthquake did not consider all the combinations of environmental factors that go to set the height of a tsunami.
Thinking about the unintentional and contra-indicating stall warning signal of AF 447 I was struck by the common themes between AF 447 and the Titanic. In both the design teams designed a vehicle compliant to the regulations of the day. But in both cases an implicit design assumption as to how the system would be operated was invalidated.
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What a near miss flooding incident at a french reactor plant in 1999, it’s aftermath and the subsequent Fukushima plant disaster can tell us about fault tolerance and designing for reactor safety.
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