As a quality assurance specialist, you’re trained to spot quality issues and product defects. You know that if the fit isn’t right or the specified color mixture is slightly off, you need to find the cause and a solution to fix it. However, quality control is difficult when there’s an unknown contaminant on your products or a mysterious product failure. In these cases, you might need to send a sample in for materials testing—and that’s where we can help.
Materials testing for quality control or failure analysis are helpful in cases where specialized chemical analysis is needed. Perhaps a device going into a critical environment must be verified to be free from contaminants; or unforeseen chemical reactions occurring during transit of a polymer based product are causing visual defects. If you’ve never experienced issues like this before, you might not know the types of materials testing techniques that are available.
Here we’ve created a guide here to help you determine if it’s time for you to contact a materials testing lab like Innovatech Labs.
Materials Testing Method Guide
The following are a few situations that require materials testing. Take a look at these common issues and the corresponding testing methods that can be used to solve them.
1. Are you concerned about the surface of your product?
Is there a visible foreign material present? Or perhaps an invisible contaminant is affecting the adhesion properties of the surface? One of the following testing techniques may be a good fit:
- FTIR analysis: FTIR uses infrared light to measure the unique light spectra absorbed by molecular structures, and can identify foreign materials present on the surface of a material.
- ESCA analysis: ESCA evaluates surface chemistry using x-rays, and can also be employed to identify thin layers of contamination on the surface of a material.
2. Are you concerned with the ionic cleanliness of your parts? Could residual cleaners cause future corrosion issues?
- Ion Chromatography: Ion Chromatography identifies and quantifies ionic contaminants, such as chlorine, sulfates, phosphates, and ammonia, using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and a conductivity detector.
3. Are you concerned about residual solvents that may be trapped in your products or about compounds that being are off gassed from your product?
- GC/MS analysis: GC/MS identifies and quantifies off gassed compounds or residual solvents in a sample using headspace analysis.
4. Is the topography or elemental composition of the surface affecting the performance of your product?
- Scanning Electron Microscopy/Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (SEM/EDS): These techniques can evaluate and map the surface of your products and determine if the surfaces are composed as you expect them with this electron microscope process.
5. Is the thickness of the passivation layer critical to the performance of your device?
- Auger electron spectroscopy: AES measures the thickness and composition of the outer angstroms of a material, making it useful in determining the surface passivation in biocompatible alloys.
Bonus question: Do you need an expedited turnaround time?
Outsourcing quality control testing, materials characterization and failure analysis to an experience lab like Innovatech Labs can get you fast and accurate results. At Innovatech Labs, typical turnaround time is 10 business days, but any of the testing methods listed here are available for expedited turnaround times.
Get Materials Testing Advice
If you find yourself puzzled about a quality issue that hasn’t come up before, it’s best to consult with materials testing experts who can devise a custom solution for you. As you can see, some of the testing methods can solve multiple issues and may be combined if needed to find an answer to your quality issue.
For help and advice, reach out to the experts at Innovatech Labs to discuss your particular application or analytical testing needs.
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