Failure Analysis of Powder Metal Steel Components

This chapter reviews failure aspects of structural ferrous powder metallurgy (PM) parts, which form the bulk of the PM industry. The focus is on conventional PM technology of parts in the density range of 6 to 7.2 g/cc. The chapter briefly introduces the processing steps that are essential to understanding failure analysis of PM parts. This is followed by a section on case hardening of PM parts. The methods used for analyzing the failures are then discussed. Some case studies are given that illustrate different failures and the methods of prevention of these failures.