Failure analysis is an essential safety and quality assurance protocol for virtually all modern manufacturing processes. Before a product is deemed safe, professionals need to make sure it is going to perform its intended functions to exact specifications without compromise.
Chemical failure analysis is among the most relied-upon forms of failure analysis used in manufacturing today, precisely because it is just as exacting as manufacturers need it to be. Using chemical failure analysis, professional scientists can proactively find and account for any number of potential failure states and make sure they never happen.
This is what you should know about chemical failure analysis, including how it works, why it’s so important, and how you can start using it now.
What is chemical failure analysis?
Chemical analysis is a broad category of scientific techniques and processes that are conducted to identify, separate, and quantify the elemental components of a sample to understand it.
Chemical failure analysis is the application of chemical analysis techniques to understand why a material or product failed – or, ideally, to prevent risk factors for possible failure before they occur in the first place. The goal of chemical failure analysis is to understand how and why a product failed as clearly as possible so that failure can be prevented from happening again.
Why is chemical failure analysis so widely used?
Chemical analysis provides the most exhaustive understanding of a material’s composition possible. By successfully separating, identifying, and characterizing every elemental and chemical component of a material’s makeup, analysts can find and easily isolate sources of failure that would otherwise be very difficult to deduce.
For example, chemical failure analysis can locate impurities and contaminants within a product even if those impurities exist only at the atomic level. If impurities like these are ultimately responsible for the product’s failure, it would be very difficult to solve the problem without chemical analysis to find them.
With chemical analysis, however, analysts would be able to successfully deduce how and why chemical impurities caused the failure and could even develop an informed theory as to how those impurities entered the product in the first place. The product’s creator could test this theory to find out where impurities are entering their product and fix the problem, preventing future failure.
How does chemical failure analysis work?
The specific tests used in a given chemical failure analysis project can differ depending on the material being investigated and the information analysts need to find. Whatever they end up using during chemical failure analysis, however, professional analysts always follow standardized, scientific testing protocols, or techniques.
These are some of the most common chemical analysis techniques Innovatech professionals apply for failure analysis:
Auger Electron Spectroscopy (AES)
AES is an ultra-high vacuum technique that provides a non-destructive and semi-quantitative analysis of surfaces, thin films, and interfaces. It can detect and differentiate between elements with remarkable accuracy, making it especially useful for distinguishing between elements that are close to each other on the periodic table.
AES works by scanning a high-energy electron beam over the sample being analyzed to excite the atoms on its surface. As the beam passes over them, the atoms on the sample’s surface emit what are called “Auger” electrons.
The AES instruments measure and record these emissions as “Auger peaks” along a chart. By comparing these Auger peaks to known elemental reference information, analysts can determine the number of emitted electrons for each element, exhaustively characterizing the elemental composition of the sample’s surface.
Notably, analysts can also use AES to locate and characterize any chemical bonds between elements on the sample’s surface. This is because bonded elements have different Auger peaks than they do when unbound.
Electron Spectroscopy for Chemical Analysis (ESCA)
ESCA is also known as X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy, or XPS. Like AES, it is a valuable surface characterization technique. ESCA is capable of identifying the whole spectrum of elements within a detection limit of 0.1 atomic percent, making it highly accurate and reliable.
ESCA is one of the most commonly used chemical failure analysis techniques because it can take as few as 30 minutes to complete while still providing highly accurate information.
Like AES and other spectroscopy techniques, ESCA uses a beam to excite molecules on the surface of the sample being investigated. In ESCA’s case, the beam is an X-ray. When this X-ray interacts with the molecules on the sample’s surface, those molecules release photoelectrons. Comparing differences in the energy level of these photoelectrons allows analysts to deduce considerable information about the elemental and chemical bindings present on the sample’s surface.
Because ESCA uses a low-energy electron beam to create a steady charge state on the surface of the material it’s scanning, the ESCA technique can also be used to analyze the surface composition of non-conducting materials.
Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR)
FTIR is one of the most widely used and reliable testing procedures used in chemical failure analysis. FTIR spectroscopy differs from other types of conventional absorption spectroscopy because it shines many different spectra of light radiation onto a sample at once to measure how the sample absorbs and emits in response.
By shining these different spectra on the material all at once, FTIR produces a great deal of raw data called an “interferogram.” The interferogram records how the sample absorbs each different wavelength and combination of wavelengths.
The name “Fourier-Transform” refers to a mathematical process used to convert the interferogram’s data into a usable spectrum chart. It does this by mapping the sample’s absorption of each wavelength of light over time. No two elements absorb each wavelength and combination of wavelengths used by FTIR in exactly the same way, which makes it possible to determine all elements the sample contains.
FTIR is particularly useful for identifying very small organic materials within or on a sample. It can successfully detect these materials even if they’re as small as 10 to 20 microns. This makes FTIR great for finding stray particles, residues, and films left behind on small samples.
Ion Chromatography
Ion Chromatography works by separating a sample’s constituent particles in a High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) system and then sorting those components by their anions and cations.
As this separation occurs, a conductivity detector within the chromatography system measures the quantity of exiting ions to produce a chromatogram charting the peak area of each anion and cation in a curve. Analysts compare the results of the chromatogram to known reference materials to identify and characterize contaminants in the sample.
Ion chromatography is invaluable for identifying trace contaminants on highly sensitive products such as electronics such as circuit boards or pharmaceuticals such as medicine or medical devices.
How can I start using chemical failure analysis?
If your products could benefit from chemical failure analysis, Innovatech is ready to help. Our experienced professionals will determine the best chemical analysis techniques for your needs and perform them with expert efficiency.
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