What information do you need in order to conduct a failure investigation?
As our customer, you play many vital roles in our joint effort to solve your materials problems:

* The background you provide on the materials, the processing procedures, and on the past history of problems can make a huge difference in the likelihood of solving the problem in a timely and cost-effective manner.
* Your description of the problem bears strongly on the accuracy of our quote or estimate, so you need to have some sense that many materials problems are far more complicated than may seem at first to be the case and provide us as reasonable a description as possible.

- Name the component with identification no.
- Name of the section of the plant/section/subsection.
- Description of the failure with photograph of failed component and system.

 -Photograph of the system where failure has occurred. Close up view of the failure.
- Materials of construction with standard.
- Original dimension of the component.
- Schematic representation of the process and position of the failed component.
- Mechanical drawing of the component.
- Detailed process description with importance on critical parameters.
- Operating /Design Pressure and Temperature.

- History of failure in chronological order in case of repetitive failure.
- Service life of the component before failure and designed life.
- Test certification of the component
- Details of the repairs attended to component before the failure.
- Evidence of upsets in the process parameters before the failure.

- Alarm trips kept in the system to avoid such failures.
- Modification alteration done to the system.
- Weather /temperature at the time of failure.
- Any other relevant details.

We  who love solving materials problems, we expect our clients to be willing to face problems and not to ask us to cover them up. We always have and always will refuse to do so. We will also remember that your problems are proprietary.

Additional Reading Information

Background information form

Steps for failure analysis

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