I recently helped a client reverse engineer some carburized machine parts that had an excessive lead time from the OEM.

My dad is an economist, and he says the cyclical economy is a good thing.

Every once in a while, I am forcefully reminded that most people in manufacturing have narrow specialties.

Boundary energy is one of the main conceptual foundations of understanding how microstructures evolve when exposed to different environments.

Now that we have a sound foundation to understand the structure of atoms and atomic bonds, it's time to move on to the concept of microstructure.

Metallurgists working at the level of my daily activities don’t need to be concerned with anything more complicated than I have just explained.

After integrating the concept of the process-structure-property materials triangle that we talked about in Part 1, the next most important concept in materials science for failure analysis of metal and polymeric components is related to structure and its multiple overlapping levels.

Over the years that I have been in western Michigan, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to increase my knowledge of my technical field.

Part 3 concludes this discussion.

As promised, here is the “quick guide to the initial visual inspection for fracture.”