Any threat to personal safety should be regarded as a hazard and treated as such. This article discusses threats from several sources, such as kinematic/mechanical hazards, electrical hazards, energy hazards, human factors/ergonomic hazards, and environmental hazards. It describes hazard analysis in terms of failure modes and effects analysis, failure modes and criticality analysis, fault tree analysis, fault hazard analysis, and operating hazards analysis. The article examines fail-safe designs, such as fail-passive designs, fail-active designs, and fail-operational designs. It also provides information on various types of warnings, such as visual warning, auditory warnings, olfactory warnings, tactile warnings, and tastable warnings.

This article describes design factors for products used in engineering applications. The article groups these factors into three categories: functional requirements, analysis of total life cycle, and other major factors. These categories intersect and overlap, constituting a major challenge in engineering design. Performance specifications, risk and hazard analysis, design process, design for manufacture and assembly, design for quality, reliability in design, and redesign are considered for functional requirements. Life-cycle analysis considers raw-material extraction from the earth and product manufacture, use, recycling (including design for recycling), and disposal. The other major factors considered include evaluation of the current state of the art for a given design, designing to codes and standards, and human factors/ergonomics.

The purpose of this article is to assist the reader in understanding the role that an engineering expert witness plays in evaluating incidents related to product liability, so that he or she may become better acquainted with the role that an engineer plays in such litigation. The topics covered are admissibility of expert opinions, how to evaluate data, factual evidence, mandatory and voluntary standards, physical evidence, medical records, scientific literature, design decisions evaluation, environment of use, user's contribution, reports of opposing experts, report of findings, and deposition and trial testimonies.

This article discusses the safety issues associated with the design and operation of thermal spray booths and spray box structures and the equipment or systems required for operating thermal spray processes. It describes the design elements necessary to mitigate sound, dust and fume, ultraviolet light, and mechanical hazards. The means selected for safeguarding personnel must be based on a formal risk assessment that meets ANSI/RIA standards. The safeguards include sensing devices, barriers, awareness signals, procedures, and training. It also provides guidelines that are intended to increase the safety awareness and the use of safety practices for gas and liquid piping and electrical equipment within thermal spray installations.

The central approach of human factors engineering is the systemic application of relevant information about human characteristics and behavior to the design of human-made objects, facilities, and environments that people use. This article focuses on the elements that are considered for an acceptable level of human performance. These include the state or condition of the human being; the activity, including equipment and required tools; and the context in which the activity is performed.

This article provides an overview of the concepts of environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) risk incidents, then discusses these concepts relative to additive manufacturing (AM): the multiple intrants, process parameters, and equipment, as well as the resulting products and wastes. The article discusses additive manufacturing hazards, which are broken down into material hazards, equipment/process hazards, and facility hazards. The environmental impact of AM and the development of EH&S standards for AM also are covered in the article.

Health and safety are critically important issues, and there are numerous aspects of the production and use of metal powders that may entail exposure to hazardous conditions. This article provides a discussion on the issues associated with the safe production and handling of metal powders and the safe operation of continuous mesh belt sintering furnaces with combustible atmospheres. It also provides a comprehensive high-level overview of the safety-related issues and concerns related to the use of compacting presses in the manufacturing sector.

This article discusses the three legal theories on which a products liability lawsuit is based and the issues of hazard, risk, and danger in the context of liability. It describes manufacturing and design defects of various products. The article explains a design that is analyzed from the human factors viewpoint and details the preventive measures of the defects, with examples. It presents four paramount questions relating to the probability of injury which are asked even when one executes all possible preventive measures carefully and thoroughly.

This article presents an overview of the rules, regulations, and techniques implemented to minimize the safety hazards associated with welding, cutting, and allied processes. Safety management, protection of the work area, process-specific safety considerations, and robotic and electrical safety are discussed. The article explains the use of personal protective equipment and provides information on protection against fumes, gases, and electromagnetic radiation. It concludes with a discussion on safe handling of compressed gases as well as the prevention and protection of fire and explosion.

Laser-beam welding (LBW) uses a moving high-density coherent optical energy source, called laser, as the source of heat. This article discusses the advantages and limitations of LBW and tabulates energy consumption and efficiency of LBW relative to other selected welding processes. It provides information on the applications of microwelding with pulsed solid-state lasers. The article describes the modes of laser welding such as conduction-mode welding and deep-penetration-mode welding, as well as major independent process variables for laser welding, such as laser-beam power, laser-beam diameter, absorptivity, and traverse speed. It concludes with information on various hazards associated with LBW, including electrical hazards, eye hazards, and chemical hazards.

The intent of this article is to assist the failure analyst in understanding the underlying engineering design process embodied in a failed component or system. It begins with a description of the mode of failure. This is followed by a section providing information on the root cause of failure. Next, the article discusses the steps involved in the engineering design process and explains the importance of considering the engineering design process. Information on failure modes and effects analysis is also provided. The article ends with a discussion on the consequence of management actions on failures.

This article provides assistance to a failure analyst in broadening the initial scope of the investigation of a physical engineering failure in order to identify the root cause of a problem. The engineering design process, including task clarification, conceptual design, embodiment design, and detail design, is reviewed. The article discusses the design process at the personal and project levels but takes into consideration the effects of some higher level influences and interfaces often found to contribute to engineering failures.

This article provides background information needed by design engineers to create part designs optimized for plastics and plastic manufacturing processes. It describes the four essential elements of plastic part development, namely, material, process, tooling, and design, and provides general design rules for the plastic forming processes covered. It also discusses the steps involved in design validation and verification.

Product design greatly influences the recycling and reuse of manufacturing materials. This article presents a design for recycling strategy based on ease of disassembly, minimizing process scrap, using readily recyclable materials, and labelling or otherwise identifying parts. It also discusses the concept of life-cycle analysis (LCA), a quantitative accounting of the environmental and economic costs of using a given material and the energy required to make, distribute, operate, and eventually dispose of the host product and its constituent materials. An important but often overlooked step in the LCA process is to identify potential improvement pathways.

Nondestructive testing (NDT), also known as nondestructive evaluation (NDE), includes various techniques to characterize materials without damage. This article focuses on the typical NDE techniques that may be considered when conducting a failure investigation. The article begins with discussion about the concept of the probability of detection (POD), on which the statistical reliability of crack detection is based. The coverage includes the various methods of surface inspection, including visual-examination tools, scanning technology in dimensional metrology, and the common methods of detecting surface discontinuities by magnetic-particle inspection, liquid penetrant inspection, and eddy-current testing. The major NDE methods for internal (volumetric) inspection in failure analysis also are described.

High-pressure die casting is a fast method for the net shape manufacturing of parts from nonferrous alloys. This article reviews the automation technologies for the different stages or steps of the process. These steps include liquid metal pouring, injection, solidification, die open, part extraction, die lubrication, insert loading, and die close. Some manual aspects of the operations, together with automation options, are discussed. The article describes finishing steps, such as finish trimming, detailed deflashing, shot blast cleaning, and quality checks. Automation of the postcasting process is also discussed.