When technology goes splat, Failure Analysis sends in a squad of detective engineers wielding heavy-duty computer wizardry
Caren D. Potter
So, one of your supertankers bellied-up on a reef and is now sliming Alaska? Or maybe another in a series of California earthquakes nuked your parking garage? Perhaps a network news show is dissing the trucks you make for inconveniently exploding on impact? Who ya gonna call? Failure Analysis.
Failure Analysis Associates answers nasty questions about nastier failures -- by machines, buildings, and humans. Walk into their Menlo Park, California, headquarters (one of 11 facilities nationwide) and you'll be tripping over scientists and engineers brandishing Ph.Ds from MIT and Stanford. Computers are everywhere. More than 1000 personal computers (laptops, Macs, and PC clones) and Silicon Graphics
workstations help slake the processing needs of the 400-plus employees. Digital Equipment minis and IBM maxis hold more than 60 databases containing such tidbits as 350 million accident and incident records, as well as handy items such as a copy of every U.S. death certificate since 1975.
The company acquires software by the "one of each" method: If there are five programs, each a little better than the others for a certain type of problem, Failure Analysis probably has them all. Perusing the typical office bookshelf turns up numerous software manuals, and not just for word processing and running spreadsheets -- structural stress-analysis packages and human body-modeling programs are just as likely.
The firm's Phoenix, Arizona, desert test facility is a Disneyland of disaster that includes a two-mile road track (festooned with your basic potholes, railroad crossings, and water-filled ditches), a 1200-foot crash rail that can send a vehicle smashing into a wall (or another vehicle -- your choice)
at up to 90 mph, a 90-foot drop tower, and a ballistics range just right for blowing things up. What more could a catastrophe-minded techie ask for?
Failure Analysis CEO Roger McCarthy estimates that the company has invested nearly $30 million in technology, and the company spends some $3 million annually keeping it all up-to-date.
Why the tech-fest? Technology helps supply the missing (or disintegrated) pieces. "We're often called in years after an accident has happened," explains Garrison Kost, head of vehicle accident reconstruction. "By that time, the site may have changed, vehicles may not be available. We collect all the evidence we can, then use technology to fill in the gaps in our knowledge."
Calamities of the Rich and Famous
Failure Analysis has been called in on many high-profile cases. When
Dateline NBC
showed a car plowing into the side of a GMC truck with side-saddle gas tanks, a made-for-TV collision that produced a dramatic fireball, Gene
ral Motors got suspicious. GM scored a major PR body-slam when Failure Analysis showed, using computerized video enhancement (and searching dozens of junkyards to find the actual vehicles), that puffs of smoke appeared a fraction of a second
before
the collision. NBC had rigged the truck with rocket motors to ensure it exploded telegenically. The network wound up eating on-air crow to forestall the libel case of the century.
Conspiracy fans were paying avid attention when Failure Analysis reexamined some of the JFK assassination evidence for the American Bar Association's mock trial presentation, "The United States v. Lee Harvey Oswald." The company showed that an assassin on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository could have committed the murder alone.
Owners (and insurers) of property damaged in the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake hired Failure Analysis to determine the extent of the damage. Following extensive and hazardous field work, and computer simulation of building beha
vior, the company could make useful recommendations about whether buildings should be repaired or trashed.
How James Dean Died
Failure Analysis's re-creation (commissioned by the TV show
What Happened?
) of James Dean's fatal car crash 40 years ago is a good example of the puzzles the company pieces together. Without much to go on, Failure Analysis used computers to reconstruct the event as a three-dimensional animation and eventually fingered the driver at fault and showed how fast each car was going when they collided.
Dean, accompanied by his mechanic, was driving his Porsche Spyder from Bakersfield toward Monterey, where he was going to race the car. It was a clear day. At 5:45 p.m., on a straight stretch of two-lane asphalt road, where U.S. 41 and U.S. 46 intersect, Dean's westbound car collided with an eastbound Ford. Dean was killed and his passenger suffered broken bones, but the driver of the Ford had only minor injuries. What happened?
James Dean
's live-fast, die-young reputation suggested an open-and-shut case: His speeding and recklessness must have been to blame. But strangely, as Failure Analysis started scrutinizing the accident, this hypothesis didn't hold together. "Damage to the vehicles didn't indicate an extremely high-speed collision," says Kost.
The steps in reconstructing this accident are typical of Failure Analysis investigations, according to Kost. (An investigation can cost anywhere from $5000 to $50,000, depending on the complexity of the accident -- double that if you want computer animations. The Dean case cost an estimated $50,000, but those findings were intended for a TV audience, not a courtroom.) First, the analysts collected whatever information they could: the original California Highway Patrol report, statements from two people in a car following the Ford, a few photos of the road and vehicles after the accident, roadway "as built" drawings, and three aerial photos of the site taken the same year as the accident. No
t much to puzzle out the truth.
The next step was creating computer models of the vehicles, their paths, the scene, and the surrounding terrain. Lacking the actual vehicles, Failure Analysis digitized two "exemplar" vehicles -- twins of those mangled in the accident -- using a theodolite, a computerized surveying tool that automatically records x, y, z coordinates of an object in AutoCAD-standard DXF format. The company's theodolite gets a lot of exercise, as does the publication Auto Trader: It's a good way to find exemplar vehicles, which Failure Analysis buys whether they run or not.
Wavefront's Advanced Visualizer high-end visualization software, which Failure Analysis runs on Silicon Graphics workstations, imported the sketchy vehicle information in the DXF file. Applying surfaces, textures, and colors to the digitized points resulted in photo-realistic 3-D computer models of the Ford and the Porsche in the accident, right down to details such as the race numbers on Dean's car.
Collisions by Computer
Failure Analysis pored over vehicle publications of the time, gleaning particulars such as: The Ford weighed 3000 pounds, significantly outweighing the 1400-pound Porsche. This news, along with vehicle esoterica (such as tire properties and crush stiffnesses), descriptions of the road surface, apparent point of contact, and the final resting positions of the two vehicles, was dumped into the hopper of Engineering Dynamics Corp.'s Simulation Model of Automobile Collisions program (EDSMAC). Using principles of mechanics, this PC-based package could determine the trajectories of the vehicles after the collision, as well as the damage to each vehicle. The laws of physics, after all, apply even in California, and even to James Dean.
The engineer tried out different combinations of speeds and angles, allowing the vehicles to crash on-screen many times, until the vehicles ended up in just the right positions and the simulated damage matched that of the actual cars (a
s preserved in photos). Guessing high speeds for Dean's car caused the simulated vehicle to overshoot its actual point of rest. (See section (c) of the figure
"Simulation of James Dean's Fatal Crash"
.) When the simulation best duplicated the actual events, Dean's car turned out to be going only a modest 57 mph, while the Ford's speed was 55 mph. So much for the speed-demon theory.
With the right vehicle speeds, EDSMAC can spit out position and velocity for each time step in the simulation: just the data Wavefront software needs to generate motion paths for an animation.
They also re-created the accident scene, using Wavefront, to make the presentation look more realistic. Theodolite measurements again marked the exact 3-D locations of the two intersecting roads, their center lines, telephone poles, and other landmarks, which were fed into AutoCAD as the basis for creating a 3-D plot of the scene. This plot ensured that the animation was scaled precisely. A photograph of th
e scene was applied as a texture map to give a near photo-realistic look.
Better Than Film at 11
The fruit of all Failure Analysis's labor was a 45-second 3-D animation of the accident, from many points of view. (
See the bottom of the illustration.
) One of the many benefits of using computer animation, as opposed to a video re-creation, for instance, is that the "camera" can be placed anywhere: in the car following the Ford, in the Ford's driver's seat, even showing what Dean himself might have seen. While the spectacle isn't gory -- no cars crumpling or glass flying into the air -- it certainly does make clear what actually happened. Dean wasn't speeding excessively. Neither was the driver of the Ford. That driver made a bad judgment and turned left in front of Dean.
The Science of Uh-Oh
Far more of Failure Analysis's work appears on the witness stand than on the TV screen. Typically, a company being sued, or its insurance
carrier, hires Failure Analysis to perform its own independent investigation and testify as an expert witness. The analysts usually bring some supporting visual aids: a graph of a computer analysis, or, as in the Dean case, a full-blown computer animation.
Computer animations are so convincing that a judge might disallow them, thinking their realism could confuse the jury into thinking they portray actual events. Nonetheless, they are usually admitted as evidence since part of the job of the Failure Analysis witness is to convey the science that went into making the animation accurate. "We only use computer animation when we need to get across a sense of the time or a complicated sequence of events," says Kost. "Or, to show the point of view of the driver, to illustrate what he could or could not see."
Because accidents often tragically involve human injury or death, Failure Analysis also has biomechanical engineers who specialize in
assessing injuries
. These engineers use
simulation software running on Silicon Graphics workstations to evaluate injury-producing forces acting on the body. Packages such as TNO's MADYMO (Mathematical Dynamic Modeling) estimate loads on the human body using vehicle motion and the geometry of a vehicle's interior. They can, for instance, calculate if the force in a collision is enough to justify claims of whiplash.
Ironically, the same sophisticated technology that helps make the world safer will almost certainly be misused by the luckless and the clueless. "Technological sophistication has the potential to make failures and accidents less likely, because the computer can second-guess you," CEO McCarthy says. "But at the same time, there will be an increasing number of people who don't understand the total system implications of what they're doing. In 20 years, Failure Analysis will be in the business of solving increasingly technological and system-related issues, such as Three Mile Island and similar control failures caused by people who d
idn't understand technology."
And that's why their business will probably continue booming.
WHERE TO FIND
Autodesk
Sausalito, CA
(800) 879-4233
(415) 332-2344
Engineering Dynamics Corp.
Beaverton, OR
(503) 644-4500
Failure Analysis Associates
Menlo Park, CA
(415) 326-9400
Silicon Graphics
Mountain View, CA
(800) 800-7441
(415) 960-1980
TNO (The Netherlands Organization)
Delft, The Netherlands
+ 31 15 143 416
+ 31 15 572 104
Wavefront Technologies
Santa Barbara, CA
(800) 545-WAVE
(805) 962-8117
illustration_link (48 Kbytes)
(a) Post-Accident Point of Rest
Where the vehicles came to rest after the accident, according to photos of the scene.
(b) Post-Impact Trajectory -- V1 Porsche
EDSMAC simulations using speeds of 77 mph and 67 mph for Dean's car resulted in points of rest beyond where the car actually ended up. According to the simulation, Dean was probably going 57 mph.
(c) In an EDSMAC damage profile,
vehicle damage is represented by darkened areas. (Dean's Porsche is Vehicle No. 1.) PSIM refers to the orientation of the midpoint of vehicle damage. Delta-V is the change in velocity at the point of impact. While EDSMAC's graphics lack flash, its calculation capabilities were critical to this investigation.
(d) Wavefront software generated this image (left)
of the two cars about to
collide. To the right, a photo of Dean's Porsche.
Off the Runway, Into the Harbor
photo_link (41 Kbytes)
Using flight data and the cockpit voice recorder, Failure Analysis recreated the approach of a 1981 World Airways flight into Boston's Logan Airport (lower left). The plane slid into Boston harbor (right).
Leak Wreaks Havoc
photo_link (44 Kbytes)
In 1988, a series of explosions, the largest one exceeding the equivalent of 1.5 million pounds of TNT, destroyed a chemical plant in Henderson, Nevada. Two people died, and the surrounding community suffered more than $70 million in damages. Failure Analysis determined that the explosion was due to a leak in a natural-gas line under the plant.
Where Were You When the Quake Hit?
photo_link (27 Kbytes)
On January 17, 1994, an earthquake measuring 6.6 struck the Los Angeles area, causing more property damage than any earthquake in U.S. history. This parking structure was one of the more artistic casualties Failure Analysis investi
gated.
photo_link
Data obtained from instrumented anthropometric dummies is used to assess injuries and compare different accident situations.
Postive Turn-Over
photo_link
Engineers at Failure Analysis's Test & Engineering Center in Phoenix use this static roll-over device to turn a
car 90 degrees for evaluations of fuel-system integrity. The device can also turn a car completely over for studies of occupants during rollovers.
Caren D. Potter is a freelance writer who lives in McKinleyville, California. You can reach her on the Internet by sending E-mail to
cpotter@northcoast.com
.
Kaboom, Inc.
