Question

A car accident expert is assigned to a case where the insurance company suspects the car company to use lower quality steel (lower TS) than the standards in their bumpers. The expert is given a post-crash bumper to run his test on. Since the bumper is completely deformed, he cannot place it into the normal bumper tensile tester. He is thinking about running a hardness test on the deformed bumper to estimate the TS of the steel to test the insurance company's theory. Do you think his method is acceptable? why?

Answer 1

Yes, his method is defenetily acceptable. Because, with doing variuos hardness tests on the bumper he can know the grade of steel used for manufacturing of bumper. He has options of doing Brinell Hardness Test and Rockwell Hardness Test. If he does so, he will get value for hardness of material. Now, from standard hardness chart for steel he can determine the grade of the steel used easily. Now, according to the grade of steel the standard value of Tensile strength of that material can be obtained and should be matched with insurance company's standards. If he suspects lower strength of the material than standard value then his assumption of was right.