You need the right materials for your industry whether the industry is Aerospace or Power Generation and Automotive, Petrochemical or Nuclear. What this means is that the materials that you select should not fail in the environment that they are expected to perform in. So, if you select a pipeline for your industry it should not fail under pressure or due to stress corrosion cracking within its performance envelope. Similarly, the material for your turbine blades must be creep resistant and the blades should not fail due to expected creep conditions. There are two practical ways of ensuring that the materials will not fail under normal working conditions. The first of these is materials testing.
Materials selected for the industry have properties that you can test. Such tests could be either destructive or non-destructive. Therefore, through materials testing you can confirm whether or not the materials qualify for selection. The destructive tests could be carried out for testing the hardness, UTS or yield strength and ability to withstand shear or torsion and creep or fatigue. Loading the undercarriage through cyclic loads till failure to confirm fatigue requirements could be carried out for the selection of the undercarriage for an aircraft. The second practical way is materials analysis.
Materials analysis involves a thorough check of the material and generally implies an analysis of the internal structure or individual constituents. The various occasions warranting such an analysis could be at the material selection stage prior to testing or in the case of a failure when the cause of the failure needs to be established. Materials analysis involves sophisticated equipment in order to carry out Chemical Analysis, Spectroscopy, Metallography or Mechanical Testing. The Scanning Electron Microscope, Optical Microscope and Gas Chromatography besides Micro hardness Testing equipment could be used to accurately determine the concentration of the individual elements, the extent of cold working, effectiveness of heat treatment or the internal structure and the impurities that may exist. Once the materials analysis has confirmed the acceptance of the material under selection a final round of materials testing is invariably carried out to rule out any possibility of the selected material failing prematurely.
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