I recently experienced a bit more excitement than I felt like I really needed, and it’s due to excessive amounts of stored strain energy being converted into cracks!

Some ASM International Failure Analysis Society members are preparing to revise the ASM Metals Handbook on Failure Analysis. I was on the committee the last time and sincerely thought it would stand for the rest of my life.

In carrying out a medical study of the effectiveness of a new treatment, the “gold standard” is the randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled study. This type of medical trial is specifically geared to human participants, whose human minds might otherwise influence the outcome.

Picking up where we left off, this latest crack was also a fatigue crack.

People send their broken, deformed, worn or corroded parts, and I help them figure out what went wrong. That’s my standard “elevator speech.”

What is the difference between following a recipe or a procedure and using a methodology?

A professor visited my lab to discuss teaching a new failure-analysis class. I wanted to show off my equipment, and insects are always interesting to look at in a scanning electron microscope. So I save dead bugs, when I see them, for educational purposes.

I always wondered why quench cracks were intergranular. That’s one of the questions that I did not notice wasn’t answered when I was in school. But some years back I realized that if two grains are adjacent, and during cooling one is getting smaller due to normal thermal contraction and the adjacent one is getting bigger at the moment of transformation to martensite, then there could be a lot of stress at the grain boundary.

Steel is an exciting and versatile material. I still think that after working with it and studying it for 42 years!