Guidelines for root cause analysis on components’ fractures at the truck industry

Abstract

Parts’ durability is a characteristic hard to track and hard to predict. Due to the own nature of the final product – the truck – it is chosen and it will be used at various applications and schedules which are ever-changing. Flexibility is the biggest advantage that outshines other transport alternatives like train or river boats. Thus the severity each customer imposes to his/her product has a great variability, resulting on a great variability on parts’ lifetime. Considering all development chain and productive chain each part must go through, it is a puzzle with many pieces, and it is the duty of the fractologist to take it all in consideration when searching for the root cause of a premature failure of a component. 4 guidelines are shown and explained, classifying them between the most probable and the least at the Brazilian truck scenario.