Our goal here is to determine how the damage is taking place.

For an all-metallic ball bearing, cleaning in solvent in an ultrasonic cleaner can be a good option.

Wear and the science used to study it, tribology, is a complex world at an intersection between science and engineering.

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.