If you would like to take your interest in engineering further, why not enrol for an Open University course. The OU offers a number of courses on engineering. If you would like to learn more about forensic engineering specifically, the Open University runs a postgraduate course in forensic engineering.

The course tackles problems that can arise from product failure caused by inadequate materials, poor manufacturing or assembly methods, or poor design. Failure can arise at any stage during product development, and gives the designer a clear indication of what to avoid so as to improve quality. One of the course's central aims is to provide guidance for good product design before development, so that wasted effort during development is eliminated. Case studies are used as illustration, many based on the authors' own cases, others on historical catastrophes and failures.

Block 1 Introduction to forensic engineering uses case studies, many including polymeric materials, to develop the skills you need for the analysis of product failure.

Block 2 Failure of products and processes provides a ‘toolbox' of techniques: observations, scientific and engineering tests that can be used to establish evidence of the causes of a failure in a metallic product or process. A casebook presents real cases drawn from over forty years of one forensic metallurgist's work. Some take you step by step through an investigation and ask you to consider allegations of serious or criminal negligence.

Block 3 Catastrophic failures examines large-scale failures that have caused loss of life, including the Tay Bridge disaster (1879), the Challenger space-shuttle disaster (1985) and the airship Hindenburg (1937). The studies consider the roles of stress concentration in the design of critical components, poor manufacturing and poor design, material failures, and poor communications.

Block 4 Intellectual property matters considers protection of new designs and inventive concepts. It concentrates on the arguments used for understanding particular patents, and the precedents that lawyers use for assessing construction, infringement and validity. Case studies include trials in which imitators were successfully sued by means of patents, and cases of new designs that were challenged unsuccessfully because the patents were weak or did not define the inventive concept widely enough to catch the alleged infringing product.

Specific courses that might also be of interest include:

Integrated Safety, Health and Environmental Management

Engineering the Future

Structal Integrity: Designing against failure

Content last updated: 03/04/2002