Hey #measuringhero, Jay here. We're back at ECR Engines where we were looking at some, well, they
had some pretty catastrophic failures from some cup series engines. Well, actually, I'm not going
to dive into it, we brought Jim back in to tell us a little bit about what the problem was. Jim,
is this the problem? Thanks Jay, yes this was the problem but we didn't know about it at first,
right. Right. It was a connecting rod bearing failure which often are some of the toughest to
diagnose with what happened, right, at 9000 rpm, 300 degree engine temperatures. If an engine fails
which obviously, we try to prevent that, it often ends up in a pile of rubble you can put in your
hands. Sometimes it ends up on the racetrack and we don't get those parts and pieces that we need.
I'd like to say that we got lucky here being able to find out what happened but it was really
using the tools and resources that we had at our disposal to figure out what the root cause was
and since doing that, we've prevented future occurrences from happening. Well that's great, can
we dive into how you solved it? Sure, I'm gonna turn it over to my engineer Aaron who can tell
you more about it. Awesome, thanks Jim. Aaron, thanks for joining us, appreciate it, thanks for
starting us on our journey. So in the case of our connecting rod failure we always have to
start back with what was the connecting rod like when it went into the engine, right. Right! And
that starts with our O-INSPECT here, so we use the O-INSPECT, right now we have valves
on it but when we check bearings we'll set up a pallet of bearings to run on the O-INSPECT and
we have all that data that's stored in our PiWeb database and we can always go back and check that
data as well. All of that data correlates to knowing exactly what's in our engine whenever
we send it to the racetrack. Sure, and what did you find? In the case of this instance,
the bearing was completely normal when it left this facility so we were pretty certain that it
had nothing to do with the geometry of the part when it left. So the bearing failure was not the
bearing? Exactly. All right, cool, well, then you got to peel the onion and go to the next level.
Absolutely, so we'll go over to our V20 and i'll explain what we do over there. Awesome.
All right, so we're at a microscope. Absolutely, so really the first step when we get into a
failure is looking into the failed components themselves and what we have to go off of
and we use our Discovery.V20 as the workhorse for that. I love this thing we can just come over here
and start thumbing through the parts finding the primary cause of the failure and, in this case, we
found some debris in a bearing which was kind of an indicator that something probably wasn't right
and I'm actually going to take you over to the SEM next where we use shuttle and find to
identify region of interest over here under the V20 and then take that for a further analysis
over on the electron microscope. So let me pause so that I understand what you did here. You took
the failed bearing, put it on the light microscope and found something that seemed curious
and because you knew where it was on the part you could use a shuttle and find to do further
analysis in another piece of equipment. Exactly, there was pretty obvious damage that meant that
something got into that bearing that shouldn't have got in and our tolerances are extremely tight
on our clearances, those interfaces, they have to work together and in this particular instance it
was pretty obvious that something got into there that should not have gotten into there. Exactly.
All right, so you knew something was in there but you needed to know what it was. Exactly,
that's where the SEM comes in. Cool, cool, let's have a look. So you found something.
Exactly. Here's the meat and potatoes, so you can see a nice color change here thanks to
a backscatter image on the SEM and the nice thing about backscatter is, is it'll show you
differences in material composition based on their atomic weight by color. So in this particular
instance, we notice really fast that that is clearly not part of the parent material of the
bearing, went ahead and used our EDS capabilities to determine what the chemical breakdown of that
debris was and the chemical breakdown turned out to be stainless steel that was fairly common
and in our case, we got a little lucky, it was the only part in our engine that was made out
of that particular stainless steel. So it quickly became obvious what we had on our hands here was
a failure to deburr an oil line. It was as simple as that, we had a little flake of material that
was extremely small, what you would consider dust, you know, to the human eye, that had gone through
the engine, made its way to the bearing interface and embedded itself in that bearing causing the
failure. Oh wow, all right, my mind is exploding because you had a very very specific material used
in one part of your engine. Exactly. And you could figure out through analysis of a bearing failed
component that that material was somewhere where it was not supposed to be. Absolutely,
we're fortunate enough that, since we do all of our design and all of our own development,
we we have control over all that stuff, we know what the parts are made of, every part has its
own QR-code that we can keep up with, individual components as they go into individual engines,
everything is tracked, has mileage, we know exactly where every part is at any given
moment and, because of that, we were able to determine, based on the material in this case,
that it was a simple burr that had fallen off of a part and took out an engine, it's that
simple. It caused your failure on the racetrack. Exactly. All right, well, Aaron, thank you for
walking us down this journey, appreciate it, it's absolutely fascinating to see how, in the real
world, you know, this equipment gets used and I appreciate your time. Absolutely. Thanks, thanks!
Hopefully we'll see you soon! Absolutely. All right! Looking forward to it.
And for you out there, don't forget to stay safe, stay healthy and see you next Thursday!