Manufacturing and Production

Metallurgical Failure Analysis and Fractography

A broken component carries the record of how it broke on its own fracture surface, and the most common way that record is destroyed is by somebody cleaning the part or fitting the pieces back together to see how they match. This course teaches reading it instead. Delegates work through evidence preservation and the sequence of examination that must happen before anything is cut or cleaned. Fracture surface interpretation follows: the beach marks and ratchet marks of fatigue, the dimples of ductile overload, the facets of brittle cleavage and the intergranular appearance of embrittlement and stress corrosion. Loading direction and origin location are established from the surface. Metallography follows, covering sectioning, mounting, polishing, etching and reading microstructure against what the material should be. Hardness traverses and chemical analysis are addressed. Corrosion and wear mechanisms are covered. Manufacturing defects as origins are addressed. The course closes on writing a failure report that distinguishes evidence from inference.