Our Failure Analysis Services

When products or materials fail in-service it is critical to accurately and quickly identify and assess the cause of the failure, enabling processes to be put in place to mitigate or prevent future recurrences. This is at the heart of failure analysis.

Failures can happen for a host of reasons including material fatigue, molecular degradation, oxidation, brittle fracture, or by how the product was originally designed and/or its use during service. Impact Solutions has a wide range of in-house equipment allowing fast turnaround times for failure analysis testing both on and off-site.

With our experience in material and product design coupled with our top-class material characterisation facilities, Impact Solutions can investigate the cause of failures and provide solutions for failure reduction in the future. Our track record has helped companies save millions by quickly getting answers to their plastic failures to put in place corrective actions as quickly as possible. We work with you to evaluate the failure and propose solutions.

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Failure Analysis Case Studies: Oil & Gas

Problem: Measuring equipment that is used in the oil & gas industry, where it is required to operate and withstand corrosive environments.

Solution:

Case Study: Safety Helmets

Problem: Product failures when products with UV stabilisers were attacked but the sun’s rays in Texas.

Solution: Confirm failure theory and review material selection for quality control.

We were approached by a leading manufacturer of construction products who on selling their product into Texas started to experience catastrophic failure on certain products within just a few months. It was very evident that the product was undergoing UV degradation which was complicated by the fact that there was a number of different base HDPE used and a range of different colours which all effect the UV absorption by the product.

Impact Solutions looked at:

The Polymer and additive package used as there was a number of colours, masterbatches and grades of HDPE used, some of the lighters colours had started to fail first as expected but it was apparent that it was not consistent.

Production control: There was no change control in place for swapping both the grade of HDPE and the additive packages with many decisions purely being taken on price, this failure was further compounded by the lack of records and batch control which is good practice in ISO 9001.

Product QC: It was apparent that there was no consideration taken for the eventual use of the product with the UV exposure in Texas being 10 times normally experienced in Norther Europe ie a product with a design life of 10 years, could because of UV exposure alone have this reduced to a single year.

How Impact Solutions approached the failure was initially to confirm that the experienced product failures were as a result of UV exposure, we then underwent a material selection exercise to identify the best combination of HDPE/additives verses price and performance. Impact then provided polymer training for key personnel and supported the manufacture to revise their in house QC process.