O-ring failure: The true causes

An evaluation of more than 500 failure analyses

author: Dipl.-Ing. Bernhard Richter, O-Ring Prüflabor Richter (www.o-ring-prueflabor.de)

In this paper, the failure causes are being analyzed, without talking about the characteristics of the damage causing mechanisms in detail. The goal of this article is to describe the actual situation concerning the failure causes of O-rings so that the right conclusions to avoid O-ring failures can be drawn. This article doesn’t explain how the results were achieved in particular.