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Mechanical Failure Analysis - Talbott Associates, Inc

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Mechanical Failure Analysis

Components fail for one of four reasons: abuse, improper design, improper material selection, improper processing. The abuse could be accidental, negligent, or intentional. Usually two reasons can be quickly eliminated, which helps to limit and define the hypotheses to test and thus properly answer the failure question. A metallurgical/materials engineer and a mechanical engineer together are a strong team to assess mode of failure. Possible causes of failure seem limitless, but are typically over-stress, excessive brittleness, corrosion, stress corrosion cracking (SCC), fatigue, design error, material quality, cold temperatures, hot temperatures, quality of water contacting the material, etc.

Determining cause of failure is routinely used in insurance matters, accident investigation, losses, and other liabilities, in the interest of assessing product liability, the cause of personal injury, the potential for subrogation by the insurance carrier. Sometimes, a nagging problem in industry can be solved with failure analysis, resulting in improved processing rates or product quality.

  • Failure Due to Abuse
    Frequently, components fail because they were used in a manner they were not designed for, or they were not properly maintained or neglected, or conditions of use were abnormally extreme.
  • Failure Due to Inadequate Design
    Components sometimes fail because the engineer in charge of a design element did not take into account all possible or reasonably foreseeable conditions. Sometimes the factor of safety is compromised by downsizing the design in the name of saving weight or material costs - the forces remained the same but the stresses in use are increased.
  • Failure Due to Poor Material Selection
    The proper materials need to be selected to achieve a desired performance; sometimes there is a wide range of material options between “the best performing material” and “just barely performing material” – many factors go into deciding which one is to be used.
  • Failure Due to Improper Processing
    From the manufacture of steel, one example is “heat treating,” which can make steel strong, but cooling too fast or too slow can alter the qualities obtained. In a different example, “UV stabilizers” are added to plastics to promote long service life of plumbing products, but a coil of piping inadvertently sitting a month in the sunlight can consume some or all of those stabilizers, making spot in the coil susceptible to attack by the chlorine in the water. Knowledge of the processing path from raw materials to the job site can shed light on components and materials failing to perform as expected.
  • Materials and Metallurgy
    The study of materials, their physical properties, and characteristics, how they are made, and how they perform, is a field of study known by several names: Materials Science and Engineering as applied to the physical world we live in, and Metallurgy and Metallurgical Engineering when focus on metals.
  • Testing and Characterization
    Please see Materials and Metallurgy