Let's Break Stuff

In my fellowship I am helping develop a fractography program. The program will be used to assist failure analysts determine the mode of failure by automatically identifying and analyzing the features present on a fracture surface.

In order to transfer this experience into the classroom, my lesson will task students with bending, hitting, and breaking specific materials chosen for their tendency to display certain fractographic features such as stress whitening, compression curl, stress concentrations, and "wolf’s ear" features.

The students will then be given an enlarged photograph of a fracture surface from some unknown material that was fractured in some unknown way. The groups’ task will be to identify fractographic features on the surface in their picture, and use those features to come to a conclusion about where the fracture started, and what may have caused it.