Even failure analysts can blow things up, it seems

Metallurgists and failure analysis professionals are trained into looking at other’s people mistakes and try to find the root cause for damage and incidents.

In this paper, we’ll be introspective and try to explain how we nearly blew our lab, using metallic powders, some ethanol and a planetary mill during our first trial at producing high entropy alloys by mechanical alloying.

Chemical, physical, metallurgical and human factors of this case will be described, as well as the lessons take from this event to ensure this never happens again in our lab.