ABSTRACT
Much of the shotgun approach can often be avoided by fracture analysis. Fracture analysis or fractography is the examination of the fractured or damaged hardware in an effort to reconstruct the sequence and cause of fracture. The path a crack follows as it propagates through a component provides substantial information about the stress distribution at the time of failure. Features on the fracture surfaces provide further information, especially the position at which the fracture initiated (fracture origin), the cause of fracture initiation (impact, tensile overload, thermal shock, material flaw, etc.), and even the approximate local stress that caused the fracture. The primary objective of this chapter is to acquaint the reader with these fracture surface features and the techniques to interpret the cause of fracture in ceramic components.
