Engineering Notes

Valevant Insights

Analysis and methods for industrial reliability practitioners — applied statistics, estimator comparisons, and field data techniques.

Published — 2 Articles

2026-08-08  •  Mechanical Design

Why Rods Buckle in Curved Wellbores: A Practical Guide to Sideload Calculation

Why virtually any compressive load buckles a slender sucker rod, and what actually determines fatigue life next — a curvature-driven sideload walkthrough with a worked field example you can reproduce.

2026-06-05  •  Reliability Methods

Weibull MLE vs Median-Rank Regression: Which to Use, and When Each Fails

When MLE beats median-rank regression for Weibull analysis and when it doesn't — a censoring-by-censoring comparison with a worked field example you can reproduce.