The safety factor: case studies in engineering judgment

Joseph C. Musto Mechanical Engineering Department, Milwaukee School of Engineering, 1025 N. Broadway, Milwaukee, WI 53202, USA
Abstract While the concept of the safety factor in mechanical analysis and design is introduced early and reinforced throughout the typical mechanical engineering curriculum, it is often misunderstood and misinterpreted by engineering students. This is especially evident in capstone design experiences, when the safety factor ceases to be a given and becomes yet another design variable that must be selected and justied by the student design team. This paper reviews the concept of the safety factor from a variety of viewpoints, each of which can provide some insight to the student of mechanical design, and addresses some of the classical misconceptions and misuses of the safety factor by undergraduate students. It also proposes teaching tools that can be used to highlight the concept of the safety factor as a design variable, whose specication requires analysis, insight, and engineering judgment. Keywords mechanical design; safety factor

Introduction The concept of the safety factor is used throughout the mechanics and design sequence in mechanical engineering. In its simplest form, it is presented as the ratio of the failure strength of a mechanical component to the expected stress that the part will see in service [1]: N= Strength Stress (1)

Many references address this concept, and dene many similar and related terms, such as design factor and safety margin [24]. In many courses on the mechanics of materials, this safety factor becomes almost an innate property of a mechanical component; it is something that can be computed, based on the known geometry, dimensions, and loading condition of the component. A typical student problem might read:
A round bar with a cross-sectional area of 4 cm2 is subjected to a 9 kN tensile load and a torsion load of 1500 N.m. The material is ductile steel, with a yield strength of 220 MPa. Compute the factor of safety with respect to yielding using the maximum shear stress theory.

When asked to dene the concept of the safety factor, a student at this point in the curriculum often responds that the safety factor is an indication of how overdesigned a given mechanical component is; since a part with N = 2 has a strength that is twice the calculated stress in the part, the part is obviously twice as strong as it needs to be.
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As students progress through the curriculum into mechanical design courses, the typical mechanics problem becomes one in which the variable to be calculated is a dimensional parameter of a mechanical component; in this scenario, the loading condition is provided to the student, and the safety factor is provided for use as a multiplier on the given loading condition. Thus the above example may now be framed as follows:
A round bar will be subjected to a 9 kN tensile load and a torsion load of 1500 N.m in service. The bar will be machined from ductile steel, with a yield strength of 220 MPa. Determine the diameter of the bar to yield a factor a safety of 2.0 with respect to yielding, using the maximum shear stress theory.

At this level, students generally still equate the safety factor with a measure of overdesign. However, they also generally equate the state of overdesign as a condition related to safety; since a part with N = 2 has a strength that is twice the calculated stress in the part, the part is twice as safe as one with N = 1. In the nal stages of the curriculum, student progress to the capstone phase, where they must complete a signicant engineering project under the types of constraints encountered in the industrial practice of design. This is the point where the true implications of the safety factor become evident. The safety factor is no longer a given; while it is has a major effect on the geometry, dimensions, and material choices in a mechanical design, it is often an elusive quantity in design. Some of the questions students must confront are: What is the safety factor in a design a calculated parameter, or a design specication? Who determines the safety factor in a design, and how? What safety factors are typical in industrial applications? For students to be able to tackle these questions in truly open-ended design situations, it is important to address these topics early and often in a mechanical design curriculum. In this paper, these issues and other misconceptions about the safety factor will be reviewed. Techniques and exercises for addressing these issues in a classroom setting will be detailed. What is the safety factor? By the time a student reaches a mechanical design course in a typical engineering curriculum, he or she has been through courses in statics and mechanics of materials. In such courses, the concept of the safety factor has been introduced. This is often done within the context of coursework in failure theories: the students analyze a mechanical part under given loading conditions to determine stress under a given failure theory, look up material properties in a handbook or database, and use equation 1 to determine the safety factor of the component. Surveying students familiar with this type of analysis often yields the following response:
The safety factor indicates how overdesigned a mechanical component is.
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While this is a misinterpretation of the concept of the safety factor, it is certainly understandable; when all of the uncertainty is removed from the analysis, a safety factor much greater than unity does seem to indicate that a part is stronger that it needs to be. In order to properly interpret this concept of the safety factor, students must be able to recognize the many uncertainties inherently present in their analysis. It is unrealistic to expect a rigorous treatment of probabilistic design at this level of the undergraduate curriculum; while some authors have attempted to integrate probabilistic design techniques into mechanical design texts, these attempts have generally been met with resistance in the academic community. However, a properly designed in-class exercise can be used to make the case that even seemingly simple design analysis contains signicant uncertainty. The following exercise can be used as in an-class activity; it can be handed to individuals or small groups of students to do within a short xed period. A reference that provides material properties should be provided. Students or groups should not share any information with each other during the activity, to maximize the effectiveness.
You have been hired as a consultant to perform an engineering design. Your customer plans to build a hoist to lift all of the people in this class to a height of 50 feet from the ground. You have been asked to size the steel cable that will be used for the hoist. What diameter cable do you recommend? Justify your answer with appropriate analysis.

There are at least four major points of uncertainty associated with this problem: 1 The design load involves estimation of the combined weight of the class. 2 No details on the size/weight of the cart that will be used to lift the class have been provided. 3 The dynamic component of the load is not addressed at all. 4 The material properties associated with the cabling are not specied. At the conclusion of the exercise, the diameter specied by each student group should be collected and posted to the class. The large variance in the resulting diameters should provide to the class an immediate lesson in design under uncertainty. In one recent implementation of this exercise, with eight students participating, the resulting diameters ranged from 0.29 inches to 1 inch. Additional data collection can be used to provide a more detailed exposure to the probabilistic interpretation of factor of safety. Students should report the tensile load that they used to size the cable. These values should be tabulated, and statistically processed to determine the mean and standard deviation of the data. Students should report the cable strength used in the analysis; cable strength should be reported as a maximum load (the product of material strength and cross-sectional area).

Again, the large range and variance in these results should make the immediate point that there is signicant uncertainty to be considered in this design. In the same recent implementation of this exercise described above, the data shown in Table 1 resulted.
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TABLE 1 Statistical data for the cable design exercise

Diameter (inches) Average SD High Low 0.567 0.283 1.000 0.290 Design load (lb) 2972 1506 5000 1547 Cable strength (psi) 54,875 24,758 100,000 25,000 Safety factor 4.9 3.7 11.8 1.5

TABLE 2
Reliability 50% 95% 99% 99.9%

Reliability coefcient for equation 3

a 0 1.65 2.33 3.08

The statistical data collected from the student groups can be used at this stage to make a stronger case for the probabilistic interpretation of the safety factor. A probabilistic interpretation of the safety factor is described in numerous resources. In general, if the assumption is made that uncertainties are normally distributed (which is implied by the central limit theorem), then the nominal safety factor, N, can be computed as: N nom = Fallow F (2)

where Fallow is the mean value of failure load for the mechanical component, and F is the mean value of service load seen by the component. (Note that equation 2 has been formulated as a ratio of loads, rather than stresses; this is to maintain generality in the cases where load and stress are not linearly related.) This nominal safety factor can be modied to incorporate uncertainty: N = N nom (1 a F allow ) (1 + a F ) (3) where Fallow is the coefcient of variation of the failure load (the ratio of standard deviation to mean), F is the coefcient of variation of the applied load, and a is a coefcient based on reliability, summarized in Table 2 [1]. This formulation is based on the calculation in the overlap between the normal distributions representing the allowable and applied loads, as shown in Fig. 1. The statistics used to describe the applied loads and material strengths can be used to model the actual variability in the design case study. In other words, the design scenario can be posed as: Assume that the different values estimated by the class for tensile load accurately represent the variable loading condition that might be seen in service. Assume that the different values estimated by the class for the strength of the steel accurately represent the variable material properties seen in the cable.
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Fig. 1 Probability distributions for stress and strength.

TABLE 3 Safety factor (N) at various reliability levels for cable design example
Reliability 50% Diameter (in) 0.290 0.567 1.000 0.290 0.567 1.000 N 1.2 4.7 14.5 0.2 0.6 2.0

95%

Using the class means as nominal values, equation 3 can be used to determine the safety factor of the design. This can be done for a variety of class-suggested diameters, such as the minimum, mean, and maximum diameters. For each diameter used, the resulting factor of safety can be computed for various values of reliability listed in Table 2. The results for the implementation detailed in Table 1 are shown in Table 3. The main conclusions that can be drawn from this in-class exercise are as follows: The safety factor is intended to provide for reliability under uncertain conditions. When comparing two designs, the design with the higher safety factor is not overdesigned; it has higher reliability and/or more uncertainty in design conditions. If uncertainties can be quantied, reliability can be calculated using statistical measures for a given safety factor.

How is the safety factor determined? In academic exercises, the safety factor either is issued in the problem statement, or is the result of a stress analysis calculation. In transitioning the student from such
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exercises to the industrial practice of design, it is important to point out that the safety factor is neither of these: it is a design parameter established by the design engineer using engineering analysis and judgment. This judgment is based on such factors as: knowledge of the uncertainties associated with the materials used in the design; knowledge of the uncertainties associated with the manufacturing techniques used in the creation of the product; knowledge of the uncertainties associated with the analysis used to establish the part dimensions; knowledge of the use and maintenance of the product in service; the risks and/or costs associated with potential failure of the product in service; the codes and standards which govern the particular industry; contractual obligations to customers.

Even where safety factors are governed by code (for example in the US boiler and pressure vessel industries), the particular safety factor chosen for design may differ from that set by code; the safety factors set by codes are generally minimum values under certain dened loading conditions. Engineers may choose larger safety factors for design, due to the presence of unusual loading conditions, high levels of risk, or other uncertainties not addressed in the code. This idea that the safety factor is established during the early phases of design through engineering judgment, and is used as a design target for the remainder of the project, is a major departure from the students rst exposure to the safety factor. Therefore, in the context of a mechanical design class, the idea of specifying the safety factor should be introduced. There are various heuristic methods for determining a safety factor based on engineering judgment. Each of these methods guides an engineer in the selection of a numerical value based on qualitative assessment of the design scenario. Methods shown in typical machine design textbooks include the Pugsley method [1], which is perhaps the most interesting to introduce to students of mechanical design; it addresses qualitative measures of uncertainty, as do alternative methods, but additionally addresses the risk of failure in the analysis. The Pugsley method indicates a safety factor given by: N = N1 N 2 (4)

where N1 and N2 are given in Tables 4 and 5 [1,5]. Given Tables 4 and 5, the students are armed with a method to apply numerical values to their qualitative assessment of design uncertainty and risk. The following three exercises can be used to provide practice with the method, and also to give perspective on how engineering judgment must be used in the selection of the safety factor. The three exercises can be given to the entire class (allowing each student to complete each exercise), or the three exercises can be randomly distributed, allowing students to perform the exercise from only one perspective before class answers are compared.
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TABLE 4
Characteristic A = VG C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C = VG =G =F =P = VG =G =F =P = VG =G =F =P = VG =G =F =P

First factor for the Pugsley method (values for N1)

B = VG 1.10 1.20 1.30 1.40 1.30 1.45 1.60 1.75 1.50 1.70 1.90 2.10 1.70 1.95 2.20 2.45 B=G 1.30 1.45 1.60 1.75 1.55 1.75 1.95 2.15 1.80 2.05 2.30 2.55 2.15 2.35 2.65 2.95 B=F 1.50 1.70 1.90 2.10 1.80 2.05 2.30 2.55 2.10 2.40 2.70 3.00 2.40 2.75 3.10 3.45 B=P 1.70 1.95 2.20 2.45 2.05 2.35 2.65 2.95 2.40 2.75 3.10 3.45 2.75 3.15 3.55 3.95

A=G

A=F

A=P

A = quality of materials, workmanship, maintenance, and inspection. B = control over applied loads. C = accuracy of stress analysis, experimental data, or experience with similar parts. VG = Very good, G = Good, F = Fail, P = Poor.

TABLE 5
Characteristic D = NS D=S D = VS

Second factor for the Pugsley method (values for N2)

E = NS 1.0 1.2 1.4 E=S 1.0 1.3 1.5 E = VS 1.2 1.4 1.6

D = Danger to people. E = Economic Impact. VS = Very serious, S = Serious, NS = Not serious.

(1) You are the on-site engineer at a hockey arena. A new scoreboard (of known weight) will be suspended over the ice surface using steel cables. You are responsible for selecting the cables, overseeing the installation of the scoreboard, and overseeing the operation and maintenance of the cable system over the life of the scoreboard. Select a design safety factor for the steel cables. Use the Pugsley method, and record each value you select in making the computation. (2) You are an applications engineer at a company that supplies steel cable. You are contacted by an on-site engineer at a hockey arena, and asked to size and supply steel cables to suspend a new scoreboard over the surface of the ice. The arenas engineer supplies you with the weight of the scoreboard. Select a
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design factor of safety for the steel cables. Use the Pugsley method, and record each value you select in making the computation. (3) You are an engineer for a scoreboard manufacturer that has sold a new scoreboard to a hockey arena. The scoreboard will be suspended over the ice surface using steel cables. The on-site engineer at the arena has asked you to recommend a cable to be used to suspend the scoreboard. Select a design factor of safety for the steel cables. Use the Pugsley method, and record each value you select in making the computation. In carrying out these exercises, students will be addressing the same design scenario from three distinct viewpoints: (1) that of the on-site engineer, who has control over installation, maintenance, inspection, and loading, but has no control over the material and who perhaps has limited experience with cables; (2) that of the cable manufacturer, who has no control over loading, installation, or maintenance, but does have control of and signicant experience with cabling; (3) that of the scoreboard provider, who has full knowledge of the scoreboard weight, but very little other knowledge or control of the design parameters. In a recent implementation of this exercise (where each student was asked to address each of the three exercises), the results shown in Table 6 were obtained. In-class comparison of the results will make two main points with regard to the safety factor: The same design scenario, when viewed by engineers with different standpoints, can result in different values for the safety factor. This is important to remember during the early phases of design, when the safety factor is selected for inclusion in design specications or contracts; customers, design engineers, manufacturing engineers, and other personnel may have dramatically different assessments of uncertainty and risk, leading to dramatically different suggested values for the safety factor. A compromise must result, but this may involve driving down uncertainties (through testing, etc.) to levels that all parties can agree upon. Even when seeing the scenario from the same standpoint, setting a safety factor involves judgment, and each engineer is led to different judgments based on experience, training, and personality. The more complex the scenario, the larger the differential between individual judgments may be.
TABLE 6 Student-recommended safety factors for the three cases
Case (1) (2) (3) Maximum N 2.08 3.12 4.72 Minimum N 1.32 1.56 1.74 Average N 1.82 2.24 2.97

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The important overriding fact about the determination of the safety factor is that it is a value set by engineering judgment, taking into account uncertainty, risk, and applicable codes and standards, that becomes a hard design target. Once the target is set, it becomes in one sense an optimal value for design; any component that results in a safety factor less than its target value is unacceptable, because it does not have the specied reliability level implied by the specication. At the same time, any component with a calculated safety factor that exceeds its target value is overdesigned; its load-carrying capacity could be reduced while still meeting the level of reliability set in the specications. While it is often impractical to meet a specied safety factor exactly (due to the use of nominally sized stock or standard components), the safety factor should be viewed as an optimum value from the standpoint of design, provided that all of the uncertainty and risk in a design scenario have been properly taken into account. What safety factors are typical in industrial applications? Of the three questions posed in the Introduction, this is the toughest to answer. In industries governed by code, safety factors are often specied. However, these values are always provided with respect to very specic loading and analysis conditions. For example, a NASA standard for pressure vessels [6] species a minimum safety factor of 2.5. In and of itself, this factor is difcult to interpret. Further reading indicates that this factor is applied with respect to the maximum design operating pressure (dened as the maximum static pressure at which the pressure vessel will be operated which does not require operation of burst discs, relief valves, pressure regulators, etc.) and the design burst pressure (dened as the pressure at which the pressure vessel should burst if all of the specied design tolerances are at their minimum values). Under this very specic denition, the safety factor can be interpreted; however, an engineer designing such a pressure vessel to supply to NASA might choose to design to a different safety factor, based on different loading or failure assumptions or incorporation of uncertainties not addressed in the standard. The conclusion is that even looking at the raw numbers used for the safety factor in different industries, it is difcult to interpret them generally without specic knowledge of the loading conditions and type of analysis implied by the factor. One company might specify a safety factor of 1.5 for a mechanical component, but will specify that a full fatigue analysis be performed and material properties be veried by testing. Another company might specify a safety factor of 5.0 for the mechanical component, but analyze under static conditions only and employing handbook data for material properties. The two companies might end up with designs quite similar in terms of material, geometry, and dimensions; the disparity in the safety factors has more to do with the uncertainties allowed in the design phase than any implied level of reliability. Even with that caveat, it is interesting to provide an exposure to the safety factors used in some industrial applications. The aerospace industry provides an interesting case study in safety factors. In such applications, there is a tremendous cost in terms of weight (and fuel consumption) when mechanical components are stronger than
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they need to be; this might imply that very low safety factors would be employed. On the other hand, loading conditions can be extremely difcult to discern, and the risk associated with mechanical failures is very high. References suggest that the aerospace industry uses extremely low safety factors [1]. A case study that has students estimate the safety factors used by NASA in mechanical components for ight hardware is instructive. Exercise. You are an engineer for a subcontractor that supplies to NASA structural components used in ight. Using the Pugsley method, estimate factors of safety for the following space ight hardware: metal structures bolted joints structures made from composite materials glass used in mechanical structures

Justify your answers. Use of the Pugsley Method for aerospace applications over a range of structural applications will provide the students with an opportunity to examine the nature of uncertainty in ight loading and structural fabrication, as well as to consider the risks associated with manned ight. When students have completed the exercise, the results can be tabulated, shared, and compared with the actual values from NASA [7]. In a recent implementation of this case study, the results shown in Table 7 were obtained. These results are typical; they indicate that when armed with the Pugsley method, students can reasonably estimate the safety factors used in typical industrial applications. The data did indicate that approximately 60% of the students consistently underestimated the safety factor specied by NASA; this is likely traceable to the underappreciation of the high level of uncertainty present in real applications. It is important to point out to the students some details pertaining to the NASA specication values, to give context for the safety factors: Two safety factors are given for joint separation; one for safety-critical components and one for non-critical components. This lends credence to the Pugsley approach of augmenting uncertainty information with risk information.
TABLE 7 Safety factors for the NASA case study
Class average Metal structure Bolted joint 1.39 1.74 Class minimum 1.00 1.50 Class maximum 2.08 1.92 NASA specication 1.4 1.2 for joint separation, non-critical, 1.4 for bolt fracture or for joint separation, critical 1.5 for uniform materials, 2.0 for materials with discontinuities 3.0

Composite structure Glass

1.73 2.50

1.10 1.30

2.72 3.68

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Two safety factors are provided for composite structures, a lower value for uniform materials and a higher value for materials with discontinuities. This accounts for the greater uncertainty in structural properties that results in bonded or joined materials. Glass has the highest safety factor requirement; this is typical of brittle materials, which are prone to fracture at stress concentration sites. These additional facts begin to provide a rationale for the students in the selection of a safety factor. Conclusions Practicing design engineers require a sophisticated understanding of the concept of the safety factor; they must move beyond the simplistic interpretation offered by equation 1, and must be able to specify and design to safety factors that truly capture the underlying uncertainty and desired reliability inherent in a design. To lead students to this level of understanding, specic attention in the curriculum must be paid to the concept of the safety factor; the methods and case studies presented in this paper have been shown to be useful tools for transitioning student perception of the safety factor from a measure of overdesign to a measure of reliability in the presence of uncertainty. References
[1] D. O. Anderson, Safety factor, Louisiana Tech University (2001, unpublished). [2] R. L. Norton, Machine Design: An Integrated Approach, 2nd edition (Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2000). [3] R. G. Budynas and J. K. Nisbett, Shigleys Mechanical Engineering Design, 8th edition (McGraw Hill Higher Education, New York, 2008). [4] R. C. Juvinall and K. M. Marshek, Fundamentals of Machine Component Design, 4th edition (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2006). [5] B. J. Hamrock, B. Jacobson and S. R. Schmid, Fundamentals of Machine Elements (WCB/McGrawHill, New York, 1999). [6] NSS/HP-1740.4 NASA Medium Weight Pressure Vessel Safety Standard (NASA Ofce of Safety and Environmental Health, August 1976). [7] NASA-STD-5001 Structural Design and Test Factors of Safety for Spaceight Hardware (NASA Technical Standard, June 1996).

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