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Perspectives from an Emerging Failure Analyst

Andrew DeVillier, Exponent: Failure Analysis Associates

Imagine that someone hands you a broken part and asks, “How did it break?” Many young engi-

neers may immediately want to perform a detailed analysis to find out exactly how that part broke.

Let’s suppose that the part failed in bending overload. The bending load must then be the cause of

failure, right? While technically true as the immediate cause, it doesn’t answer the broader question,

“What was the root cause?” Failure analysis isn’t just an individual action, but a process. It doesn’t

just involve the events immediately preceding the failure, but everything that led up to the failure,

including information such as people, processes, documents, and maybe even the weather and the

environment. The root cause may not even appear to be directly related to the failure at first. So

why was our part overloaded in bending? Was it made from the right material, with the right heat

treatment, and properly processed? Were there any defects during manufacturing? Was it designed

to handle load, and was that design sufficient? Was too much load applied?

All of these questions help establish the root cause of the failure. Maybe no one knew what the

load limits were. Or maybe the part wasn’t designed to handle load in the first place, but loading the

part proved convenient for another task! It’s easy to get caught up in tools like electron microscopy, mechanical testing, and

metallography when performing failure analysis, but at the end of the day, the most important tool of all is the one between

our ears. Without it, we lack the ability to ask questions, interpret data and results, and make connections between all of the

information we’ve collected and the events that occurred. And that’s what failure analysis is really about.

For the new failure analyst, ASM offers several useful reference books including

How to Organize and Run a Failure Inves-

tigation

(D.P. Dennies);

Understanding How Components Fail

(D.J. Wulpi); and

ASM Handbook Volume 11: Failure Analysis and

Prevention

DeVillier

EMERGING PROFESSIONALS

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