Failure Analysis

Failures may occur throughout the life of an asset—during prototyping, commissioning, operations or through mishap. They can also occur with respect to processes. When a failure happens, a failure analysis is crucial to prevent recurrence and mitigate future failures, to improve future asset designs or processes, and to preserve life safety and prevent financial loss.

The Specialty Engineering Group of SOCOTEC conducts failure analyses for buildings, facilities and infrastructure, equipment and components and materials, as well as manufacturing and operating processes. Our group is founded on a wide range of technical, laboratory and field expertise combined with over fifty years of experience serving industries in the US and worldwide. Our capabilities include:

• Materials engineering—design, selection and specification, performance, aging and failures.
• Plant and process engineering—familiarity with a broad range of structures, plants and equipment
• Metallurgy, welding engineering and corrosion
• Fitness for service
• Fatigue and fracture mechanics

Our failure analysis capabilities are supported by a full-service materials testing laboratory, where simulations at all scales can be conducted, a non-destructive testing and field engineering group that can be dispatched to an accident or failure site within 24 hours, as well as a multi-discipline engineering staff with computational tools including finite element, computational fluid dynamics and structural mechanics.