Forensic Engineering is defined as the investigation of the root cause of failed materials in structures, components, machinery, vehicles, and products that do not perform as intended per engineering design. The materials failure would cause personal injury, property damages, and financial losses and lead to litigation.
Product Liability Review
- Intellectual Property Analysis
- Forensic Engineering Documentation
- Metallurgical Expert Witness
- On-Site Engineering Investigation
- Corrosion Risk Assessment and Cathodic Protection
- Water Corrosivity and Water Treatment
- Soil Corrosivity
- Atmospheric corrosion
Metallurgical Testing and Failure Analysis is the process by which a material engineer determines the mechanism that has caused a component to fail. Typical failure modes involve various types of cracking modes and corrosion attack. Metal components fail as a result of conditions to which they are exposed to as well as the stress that they experience. Often a combination of both environmental conditions and stress will cause failure.
Metal components are designed to withstand the environment and stress that they will be subjected to. A metallurgist takes into account as much of this information as possible during analysis. The end goal of failure analysis is to provide a determination of the root cause and a solution to any underlying problems to prevent future failures. Failure and damage analysis services include for example material assessment, metals investigation, fracture study, electronics evaluation, fire damage investigation, design review and many more.
Analysis of a failed part can be done using destructive metallurgical testing. Destructive testing involves removing a metal component from service and sectioning the component for analysis. Destructive testing gives our failure analyst the ability to conduct the analysis in the lab and perform tests on the material that will ultimately destroy the component. Non-destructive testing is a test method that allows certain physical properties of metal to be examined without taking the samples completely out of service. NDT is generally used to detect failures in components before failing catastrophically.