Critical assessment: forensic metallurgy – the difficulties

Forensic metallurgists are asked to address failures across a wide range of materials, length-scales, and applications. This requires in-depth knowledge of metallurgical principles, manufacturing, and engineering fields. The metallurgist will be asked to determine whether or not the appropriate engineering or quality standards have been followed – and this may be the Standards that were in place at the time of manufacture, not those currently in place – and whether the failure results from use or abuse. The paper reviews how these skills have been applied to a range of historical and contemporary cases involving failure and discusses some of the issues that are important for determining the root cause of a problem. Some difficulties in current approaches are also presented.