Root Cause Analysis

Failure analysis is the science and technique of understanding how materials and products fail. Whenever a component no longer performs its intended function, it is valuable to understand how and why it has failed. Failure analysis is a critical part of understanding what went wrong, what could have been done to prevent the failure, and how one might prevent similar failures. Any type of failure is, in nature, undesirable, but in some applications the consequences may go beyond inconvenience or cost, and may become critical or life threatening to the extents that even one failure, no matter how rare, would be considered unacceptable. Past experience shows that most failures are not extraordinary events; they are often foreseeable and some are quite preventable. One should not always look at the negative side of failure analysis as an activity, which tries to find the wrong things in material, design, production, installation, and service. On the contrary, an objective failure analysis can lead to several positive consequences.