Constructing Competence in Failure Analysis - by Debbie Aliya (Hardcover)

About the Book

This preeminent guide details a new 6-step fractography method and shows how human factors distract investigators. Your career-long companion has 300+ images. By including epistemology, it promotes confidence in your FA conclusions.

Book Synopsis

A technical, epistemological view of failure investigations and analysis with a focus on metal alloys and polymers for professionals, college students and the experts who intersect with investigations.

Debbie Aliya wrote the popular article on the failure analysis process for the ASM Handbook Volume 11 back in 2002, and it's one of the few articles from that authoritative work that remained virtually unchanged for the 2021 edition. People around the world rely on this article for their in-house failure analysis procedures. Now, the descriptions of each step of the investigation have been expanded to show the nitty-gritty details of everything from how to see important features, how to negotiate the scope of the project, how to select specimens for nondestructive and destructive testing, which NDT and mechanical and microstructure test methods to use, and more.

Constructing Competence in Failure Analysis is the preeminent technical guide detailing a comprehensive new six-step method for performing fractography, conveying new mental structures so as to extract the most data possible from the macro-scale inspection, and allow the practitioner to overcome difficulties related to damaged fracture surfaces. A new structure for classification of damage categories is also presented.

This visionary compendium details how human factors enable or distract investigators. It facilitates better scope negotiations, provides specialized vocabulary enhancing clarity with technical and non-technical clients alike. It includes many thought provoking real-life FA stories, making the book suitable for a capstone course in failure analysis for multi-disciplinary engineering programs.

It's a big book full of images and instruction. If you love digging into how things fail, then you will love exploring this book. It is your definitive career-long companion. It shines light on basic practical issues and powerful conceptual structures. By including epistemology, it promotes mastery of the technical body of knowledge and promotes justifiable confidence in your Failure Analysis conclusions.

Review Quotes

"I enjoyed reading the book and getting deeper in your mindset for failure analysis. In addition to the mindset and technical parts,

there is one huge contribution of this book for us, non-native English speakers... and that is engineering vocabulary. You have

explained all the main terms widely enough to understand the background of the word. We all know that terminology between

languages is not possible to exchange one-to-one with a direct translation. In my role working part-time at the local university as a

researcher and teacher, I will always highly recommend this book to my students, to gain the proper language skills and mindset

for their future in materials engineering. Finally, let me congratulate you for capturing your lifetime of knowledge for this book. Thank you very much for including me as part of the review process." - Libor Trsko, PhD, Research Centre of the University of Zilina & Materials Engineer at Danfoss Power Solutions

"My compliments for the seventh chapter: it covers a lot of crucial topics in real world Failure Analysis, through a series of Case

Histories. I should mention that the style of the presentation transmits a vivid and very spontaneous spirit which is found in

classical novels and literature. It is certainly not usual in technical books and that makes this contribution truly original and

innovative." - Dr. George Pantazopoulos, Technology and Quality Manager, ELKEME, Hellenic Research Centre for

Metals S.A.

"[Constructing Your Competence in Failure Analysis] it seems extraordinary to me that you have combined human factors such

as reasoning and thought that I have not seen addressed in any other book with technical-analytical content. I applaud this. You

are an extraordinary engineer and... are incomparable." - Jose Medina