Definition: transient faults?

Feb 13, 2004 3 Replies

Hello,



I am having a discussion with a friend of mine about the definition of transient faults. As I understand it, a transient fault is a sudden, brief fault that disappears after a short time; goes back to zero-fault.



But if the fault does not go back to zero but is not a steady fault, is it still a transient fault.



And what about intermittent faults compared to transient faults? I am a bit confused.



Best Regads Olof



I would think that a transient fault is an intermittent fault. It comes, it goes, and never sticks around. If anything an intermittent fault might stick around, but only appear irregularly, while a transient doesn't stick around. They can be distinguished from a continual fault in part by the utterances of those who are trying to detect and fix them.

Thanks Michael,

Olof

"Herman Family" wrote in news:8g6Xb.17963$ snipped-for-privacy@news02.roc.ny:

Olof,

It seems to me a transient fault occurs only once or extremely rarely. It is not possible to reproduce and hence is virtually untraceable. It is caused or triggered by rare events. If it occurs only once it becomes part of the lore of weird things that happened but were never explained. It is eventually forgotten. If it occurs relatively frequently it is an intermittent fault.

An intermittent fault is not continuous but may be quite frequent. It is often traced to some external influence such as temperature, humidity, vibration, EMF, etc. The trick to tracing it is to cause it to occur on demand.

Walter.

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