There are a lot of resources available on the subject of failure analysis.

Answering a question without knowing quite a bit about the context is usually where misunderstandings start.

"We don’t see reality as it is. We see it as WE ARE."

In failure-analysis work, we often want to know why the damage happened

In a polycrystalline material, which includes the majority of tonnage of commercial metals and even many polymers, there will be a distribution of crystal orientations within even a small cross section.

The classical way to reveal a microstructure in commercial metals is to make a cross section.

Many of my clients (or occasionally blog readers!) will send me a photo and ask me a question.

Last time, in Figure 13, we saw a series of four pieces of pyrite with increasingly numerous individual crystals within the same approximate volume of material.

Note the highly superior depth of field and surface detail visible in the SEM image compared to the light microscope.

Here's the second part of our series on how to view microscope images.