Fractography - Applications

Applications

Fractography is a widely used technique in forensic engineering, forensic materials engineering and fracture mechanics to understand the causes of failures and also to verify theoretical failure predictions with real life failures. It is of use in forensic science for analysing broken products which have been used as weapons, such as broken bottles for example. Thus a defendant might claim that a bottle was faulty and broke accidentally when it impacted a victim of an assault. Fractography could show the allegation to be false, and that considerable force was needed to smash the bottle before using the broken end as a weapon to deliberately attack the victim. Bullet holes in glass windscreens or windows can also indicate the direction of impact and the energy of the projectile. In these cases, the overall pattern of cracking is vital to reconstructing the sequence of events, rather than the specific characteristics of a single crack. Fractography can determine whether a cause of train derailment was a faulty rail, or if a wing of a plane had fatigue cracks before a crash.

Fractography is used also in materials research, since fracture properties can correlate with other properties and with structure of materials.