Arc flash events, battery fires, and board-level failures rarely announce their cause. We determine it from the physical evidence — independently, and to a standard that holds up in court.
Start a conversation with our AI Research Concierge, already scoped to electrical, electronics & batteries. Select a specialization to prompt it, or describe your situation directly.
Electrical failures are unusually good at destroying their own evidence. An arc consumes the conductor that started it; a thermal runaway burns the cell that initiated it; a cracked solder joint conducts perfectly until the moment it does not. That is precisely why these investigations demand method rather than intuition — and why the order of examination matters as much as the tools. This department covers the failure modes where current, heat, and materials interact, from a 480 V switchgear arc down to an intermetallic layer a few micrometres thick.
Each specialization area covers a distinct failure mechanism with its own physics, examination protocol, and governing standards. Start with the one that matches your incident.
Arc flash and arc fault events — incident energy, protection failures, and injury causation.
investigateCracked, fatigued, and voided solder joints — intermittent faults and field returns.
investigateContact resistance, fretting corrosion, and overheated terminals in connectors and terminals.
investigateBoard and device-level failures — CAF, ESD, EOS, die defects, and contamination.
investigateThermal runaway, internal shorts, separator defects, and manufacturing contamination.
investigateElectrical investigations are sequenced so that each step preserves the evidence the next one depends on. Non-destructive work always precedes destructive work.
Technical briefings and case analyses on electrical, electronics, and battery failures — written by the people who investigate them.
Solder joints have a fatigue life. Whether reaching it in service is a defect or an expected wear-out depends entirely on what the design assumed.
readArea-array packages hide every joint under the component. The defects that matter there are invisible to inspection and often pass electrical test at room temperature.
readA part that is not what its marking claims fails in ways the design never anticipated. Detection is a documented sequence, and the supply chain record is half the answer.
readMoisture, ionic contamination and a voltage bias will grow conductive metal between conductors. The board that passed final test genuinely passed it — the short did not exist yet.
readMicro-motion measured in microns destroys contacts that pass every bench test. It is the dominant wear mechanism in vehicle and machinery connectors, and it is nearly invisible.
readA failed termination points at an installer, a manufacturer or a materials decision made decades earlier. The joint itself usually says which.
readFire and arcing consume material but they also leave a great deal behind — arc melting patterns, oxide and spatter deposits, conductor bead morphology, thermal gradients across a board, and the distribution of damage in an enclosure. Arc-damaged copper looks materially different from copper melted by an external fire, and that distinction alone often separates cause from consequence.
Everything in the affected circuit path, not only the obviously damaged part: the device, the conductors, the connectors, the overcurrent protection, and any control or logging hardware. Do not re-energize, clean, cut conductors, or discard breakers and fuses — their internal state is often decisive evidence.
Frequently, yes. Defect signatures tend to be intrinsic and localized — a contaminant particle, a plating discontinuity, an inadequate creepage distance. Misuse and overload leave distributed evidence consistent with conditions outside the design envelope. The distinction is drawn from physical evidence read against the design specification and applicable standards, and it is usually the question with the most money attached.
It depends on the failure. Arc flash work commonly references NFPA 70E and IEEE 1584; battery and cell work references UL 1642, UL 2054, IEC 62133, and UN 38.3 for transport; electronics assembly work references IPC-A-610 and IPC-7095 for BGA. Fire origin-and-cause investigations follow NFPA 921.
Describe the incident. We will scope it and connect you with the right expert — usually within one business day.