Failure Analysis

“Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” – Dale Carnegie

Traditional metallurgical failure analysis involves laboratory analysis of a fracture surface and microstructure in order to determine the mode of failure, be it single overload, fatigue, environmental damage, corrosion, SCC, etc.

While this is useful, most field failures involve a series of contributing factors which led to the failure, of which the final fracture is only one piece. While VGO’s approach to failure analysis involves traditional metallurgical failure analysis, which we perform in our full-featured metallurgical lab, we also leverage our stress analysis and inspection capabilities to provide a more comprehensive, well-rounded failure analysis. This gives us the ability to not only identify the mode of failure and contributing factors, but also take the next step and propose mitigation strategies to prevent failure in the future.

By leveraging our analysis capabilities, metallurgical knowledge, and instrumentation expertise — we can assist in design modifications, suggest material and processing changes, and implement monitoring and early-warning solutions. In other words, the analysis doesn’t end until the root cause is corrected.

Failure Analysis Services:

• Fracture Analysis
• Corrosion Analysis
• Weld Evaluation
• Material Identification
• Root Cause Analysis
• Flaw Identification