Understand Why Ceramics Fail and Designing for Safety
April 29, 2019—8:00 a.m.– 4:30 p.m. | Held in conjunction with Ceramics Expo 2019
Instructor: Steve Freiman, Freiman Consulting Inc.
Engineers who use ceramic components know they are brittle and can cause damage and even mechanical failure. This course presents a practical fracture mechanics background so you can better understand brittle failure. This course is good for anyone working with ceramic components to include electronic, optical, or structural applications, among others.
Course Objective
In this course we will describe some of the unique characteristics of ceramic materials, which must be taken into account in their design and use. Microstructural effects, which have a major influence on both fracture toughness and strength, will be explored in some detail. The deleterious effects of external environments, particularly water, on crack growth, and the test procedures needed to explore this phenomenon will be discussed. Best practices in the use of both fracture mechanics and strength tests will be reviewed. Quantitative fractographic analysis of failed parts will be shown to be a powerful tool in understanding the cause of failure as well as to quantitatively determine failure stresses that arose in-service. Finally, a modern, computer-driven approach to statistically examine strength distributions for ceramics will be demonstrated. It will be shown that this tool can be used to set service stresses which will ensure safe lifetimes to very low probabilities of failure.