Unilab Laboratori Industriali S.r.l. offers you its expertise and equipment to perform failure analysis on components. Failure analysis is a process of analysis which aims to determine the causes of malfunction or failure of a product or component. The aim of this process is to provide guidance to the customer to prevent the recurrence of failure.

Who is requesting the service

Corrosive phenomenon on painted carpentry

When a mechanical component fails, the user suffers damage which must be quantified and related to the cause.

A failure analysis can then be required:

• by a designer, who considers the design to be coherent but does not understand the causes of failure;
• by the component manufacturer to assess whether manufacturing modes may have introduced critical factors that could cause/trigger failure;
• by the suppliers of the raw material, to assess the quality of the material used in relation to the event of damage

What is fault analysis

These types of investigations are typically multidisciplinary and may involve not only production aspects but also design and installation. The analyses range from process study to material characterization, up to analysis of operating conditions.

The study begins by collecting information on operating conditions and information on failure of the component at the time of failure. It is essential to know the history of the load and work of the broken component in order to guide the engineer in understanding the phenomenon. Non-destructive analyses are initially carried out to obtain important information without altering the state of the damaged parts (surfaces of breakage, corroded, degraded, worn-out parts). PND and tomography techniques are the main methods used in this phase. Destructive analyses will then be carried out which allow the investigation to be further developed but require adequate sample preparation: metallographic cross-sectional examinations, mechanical tests, hardness tests, chemical surface or mass analyses, etc.

All these analyses together produce an informative framework capable of describing, most often, the reason for the failure.

Materials needed for investigations

To conduct the best investigations our team needs as much material as possible on the fault history. Unilab may require you to take photos in the field, analyse drawings, study of manufacturing processes and collect data on operations.

Tests and laboratory instruments for fault analysis

The primary tools for managing a failure are:

• Tomography radioscopic checks, penetrating liquid checks, visual examinations with possible macrographs for non-destructive investigations
• Electron microscopy (SEM/EDX) for morphological analysis of fracture surfaces and point chemical analysis in areas of interest (e.g., in corrosive phenomena)
• Optical microscopy, for the execution of fractographic analysis and microstructural characterization of the material with abnormalities or defects present

The result of the activity is a technical report that describes the reason for the damage and, if possible, presents possible solutions/improvements or simply precautions to avoid the recurrence of the phenomenon.