Younger Members Event 2005

Forensic Engineering

Sheffield Hallam University opened its doors to the Welding & Joining Society for one of its Younger Member's Events in November, on the subject of forensic engineering.

Dr Alan Smith of Sheffield Hallam University introduced the principles of forensic engineering providing examples from real life. These included cases where the science was applied to criminal investigations, road traffic accidents, engineering failures and other disasters that have made front page news.

This introduction was followed by presentations from Richard Pargeter and Gene Mathers from TWI in the practical approach of technical failure investigations and the identification of failure modes. This information gave the delegates the wherewithal to conduct their own investigations; an activity that made up the rest of the day.

Nine teams were given the background to a real engineering catastrophe that had occurred. These investigations included:

• John Thompson Pressure Vessel
  
  
• MV Kurdistan Oil Tanker
  
  
• Boeing 707 Air Crash and Lusaka, Zambia
  
  
• Alexander L Kielland Offshore Accommodation Platform
  
  
• Failure of a construction node in a high profile building project

Details of all but the last incident are in the public domain.

From basic details of the incidents the teams tried to answer the following questions:

• What was the mode of failure?
• What was the cause of failure?
• Who was responsible?
• How could it be prevented from happening again?

The answers to these questions were far from straightforward. In reality, the investigations took anything from a few months to several years to resolve! With only a couple of hours all the teams did remarkably well to get close to the final conclusions of the original investigators.

Each team presented its findings to the rest of the delegates, after which the full story of each incident was revealed by Dr Alan Smith, Richard Pargeter and Gene Mathers, along with Dr Ruth Hammond and Dr Philippa Moore from TWI.

Previous event:
Invention and Innovation: tomorrow's view of the aerospace and automotive industry - November 2004

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