Failure Analysis: Glass Bottle Breakage

Fractographic analysis is a powerful tool to understand why articles have failed. Silicate glasses are mostly sensitive to tensile stresses, they are brittle at a macroscopical scale at room temperature. Glass failure strength is very dependant on damages on stressed surfaces. A broken item can be rebuilt from the fragments, so that it can be analysed afterwards. Much information can be gathered from the fracture pattern, footprints on glass, and fracture surface analysis. This information allows to compute the local stress at fracture origin and to explain the root cause for surface damage and stress concentrators. An example of bottle fracture analysis is presented in this paper.