Read Consulting LLC has been in operation for over 30 years. During this period, we have examined well over 700 material failures. These include part failures made of metals, plastics, ceramics and glass. Many people do not understand that failure analysis is a skill used to help understand the cause of personal injury. Additionally, the techniques are used in industry to fix production problems and improve both products and manufacturing processes.
An example would be failure analysis of brittle materials such as glass, plastics and ceramics. In these failures marking on the fracture surfaces are used to trace the failure to the start of the failure (i.e. the origin). This region is examined microscopically to determine the cause of failure. Basically, one can determine what type of damage caused failure initiation, and from this one can determine the source of the damage and where this might have happened. In manufacturing this analysis can be used to determine which process step needs to be corrected or improved.