Читать книгу Root Cause Failure Analysis - Trinath Sahoo - Страница 28

This is the physical mechanism that caused the failure, it may be fatigue, overload, wear, corrosion, or any combination of these. For example – corrosion damage of a pipeline, a bearing failed due to fatigue. Failure analysis must start with accurately determining the physical roots, for without that knowledge, the actual human and latent roots cannot be detected and corrected. The analysis may focus on physics of the incident. In the case of TITANIC, the iron rivets were too weak.

The steel plates of the TITANIC buckled as there were excessive stress applied to the hull when the ship hit the iceberg. The strength of steel and hull was not sufficient to prevent the hull from being breached by the steel plates buckling. The failure of the hull steel resulted from brittle fractures caused by the high sulfur content of the steel, the low temperature water on the night of the disaster, and the high impact loading of the collision with the iceberg. When the TITANIC hit the iceberg, the hull plates split open and continued cracking as the water flooded the ship.