A More Reasonable Definition of Failure Mode for Mechanical Systems Using Meta-Action

Identification of failure modes is a vital work in the process of failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA). Since the traditional failure mode is defined as a specific function failure or a part failure, there are uncountable failure modes for mechanical products. Then, it is too hard to list or predict all of the potential failure modes when we do FMEA on a machine. Besides, the same failure can be defined as a failure mode or a failure cause casually, which makes the analysis work stuck. To solve these problems, we propose a meta-action failure mode in this paper. A machine is decomposed into meta-action units based on the meta-action concept, and the abnormal motion performance of the unit is defined as the meta-action failure mode. All the potential failure modes of meta-actions and the expressions are given in theory. To verify the practicality and advantages of the proposed method, an illustrative example is provided. The results show that the meta-action failure mode can overcome these problems in traditional failure modes and simplify the FMEA process.