The Eccentric Enginer Mini-series Part 3: Failure Modes

In this chapter: I'm just kinda going to throw out a a bunch of things and ask too many questions. Here we go!

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Hello everyone, I apologize for the irregularity of my posting over the last few weeks. Work has been very hectic but I promise I have been thinking about this blog and all of those who read it, and how I can bring quality content to you. This week I want to talk about an important aspect of the growth process that I think even I don't fully understand still, and that is failure. In life, failure can mean many things depending on the situation and individual, but we'll go with a working definition of failure meaning that an expectation is not met. That seems to be a rigid enough definition for our purposes, but is versatile because it lets us use that definition as we consider the engineering metaphor.

The reason I want to talk about failure is because I don't think it's talked about enough, except by people on Facebook who post a ton of motivational videos on why people should "fail more often" or something to that effect. I think that's all well and good, but in order to shift my mindset from seeing failure as a bad thing and turning it into a stepping stone to learning, I think it's critical to understand the nature of failure at a fundamental level, how it happens, where it comes from, where to go from there. I'm going to mince a lot of the technical terms and oversimplify things on purpose so we can all be on the same page and so I can talk in simple terms without having to explain myself in so much detail that I'd get lost in the sauce.

In engineering, specifically when we talked about materials that we use to make products, we consider failure of many types, just like in life. In life, I may have a failure by not meeting a grade expectation in school, a person's expectations of me in a relationship of any kind, or maybe I don't hold myself to a high enough standard and don't aim high enough. Whatever the case is, in my mind, there's a metaphor for modes of material failure that I think are relevant. The failures modes that I want to talk specifically about today are yield, fatigue failure, and creep. Yes, creep is a real term, and yes, I will talk about it. We can use our working definition of failure to this part of our discussion as well: a material's inability to meet a certain design expectation or criteria.

Yield: When we talk about yield with engineering materials, we're usually talking about metals, which are ductile materials for the most part. Metals have a material property called the yield strength which is the point at which the material will basically buckle and will not return to its original shape. The yield strength is a property that is inherent to the material, but can be increased by forging it, which is basically heating up the material and struck or put under extreme pressure. Think about this from a growth perspective. We all have our "yield strengths," the points at which we feel we are ready to break and unable to return to who we were. I really think that's a beautiful albeit oversimplified way of thinking in terms of relating engineering with growth. It makes intuitive sense, and as I have written this mini-series, I've found that the laws of nature are apparent everywhere, as obvious as that may sound. Engineering is so applicable to other domains of life, and to me it just makes sense. Anyway, when I'm low, I think I'm at my breaking point. But then I'll talk it out with my family or friends, and get through that tough time, I'll journal, and push through. Just when I think I have reached my yield point, I "forge" on and keep going. This is where the strength is made, and although that's probably like the most recycled phrase about getting stronger, I do believe it wholeheartedly. The point that I wanted to understand myself was that I have to recognize where I think my breaking point is so that the next time I'm low, I'll know that I just have to, under that heat and extreme pressure, keep going and get stronger.

Fatigue: The next mode of failure that I want to bring up is fatigue failure. Fatigue failure happens when a material is subject to cyclic loading over time. At a certain point, the material cannot physically handle that cyclic load anymore, as it slowly loses strength with each cycle. And it's kind of intuitive because larger stresses cause fatigue failure much quicker and with a lower number of cycles than a smaller stress. Extending that to life, we can say that things that are small annoyances really have the ability to bring us down in a big way if we don't mitigate them or have an outlet to express that discontent. For me, a small, consistent annoyance or thing that upsets me is when I have an intrusive thought about not being good enough at something. It's small, I know it's there, but I don't feel like it's big enough to do anything about in the moment. So the number of cycles increases and the BOOM, fatigue failure i.e. breakdown. But learning what magnitude and how many cycles I can withstand and increasing that is important to moving on in life. I'm still trying to learn that and it's been tough.

Creep: This last failure mode is my favorite because I like the name the most. Really. Creep is similar to fatigue failure but it actually has to do with strain, which is the change in length of a piece of material over its original length. Creep usually occurs when a material is heated up and it slowly stretches to begin with, then increases its stretching speed and eventually breaks. The creep rate is the amount of length that a material stretches (strains) over time before it breaks. This is slightly different from fatigue in that it is time-dependent. I don't really have a good concrete example of this, but this one contributes to our discussion of understanding the nature of failure by showing that if left unchecked, things that eventually cause failure can "creep" up on us, slowly at first and then before we know it, we're overcome by the circumstances that cause us to fail. The point I want to make is to help myself and others understand what that timing looks like to each person.

Depending on your belief system, maybe you will or won't agree, but I posit that God is an engineer. A meticulous planner, cycle-oriented, and always employing balance and harmony. I hope my ramblings made sense to you guys and it can help us better understand failure, and how we can learn from it to make us stronger, together.