Metallurgist admits faking steel test results for US Navy subs

That provides a lot of incentive to bribe employees from your competitors to falsify data ... totally destroys their company and they can't even create a new company to compete!

Which is the same as killing the company. If the executives are going to be permanently jobless and destitute, then there's a strong temptation to try to cover things up, which is the worst case scenario for the Navy.

ETA: in some ways, the Navy might have reasons to prefer this contractor in the future, because the issue seems to have been caused by a lazy rogue employee and the company seems to have strong enough ethical/internal standards that the Navy can reasonably expect issues to be brought to their attention.

> terminate the contract and blacklist the company permanently (include the board of directors to ensure no hopping between companies to take advantage).

Here, Bradken acquired a foundry that had been faking test results for decades before; eventually discovered it, and reported it to the Navy once they did. Giving Bradken the death penalty out of this seems absurd.

(Not all of Bradken's actions post-discovery were perfect, and it did take them several years post-acquisition before they detected the ongoing fraud-- so there was definitely a failure here, but...).

The NYT article about this same issue (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/us/metallurgist-navy-fals...) mentions that Bradken is "the Navy's leading supplier of cast, high-yield steel used for naval submarines." Without knowing the intricacies of the cast of suppliers for submarine parts, it's a safe bet that blacklisting Bradken would set back a _lot_ of naval construction projects by a significant amount. I imagine that dampens the enthusiasm within the Navy for crucifying Bradken as an example for the rest of 'em. If I were a competing foundry, and I had seen this coming and was in a position to show up this week with detailed quotes and delivery dates for replacements for Bradken's upcoming work, that might be a huge win for me. My guess is that there's a way for another company to 'pull' the Navy out of this massive logjam, but the Navy can't easily 'push' itself out.

reasonable if it's a systemic failure, but the company did notify the US Navy when it found out (though deflected the actual cause). sounds more like a rogue employee.

disproportionately severe penalties will have the opposite effect in future cases- as people will do more to hide faults than reporting them.

I'm sure that contractors have stiffed the Navy in bad faith in the past, and I'm also sure that most of the stiffing never resulted in penalties.

But, yeah, of course there's a incentive and risk landscape that executives considered when choosing whether to report or not. I'm curious about that process and also the process by which the Navy determined the fine amount. Did they take into consideration how it'd affect the company's books and levy a fine that'd amount to a slap on the wrist?

The QA is extensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBSAFE

Depending on how records were kept, it could have been incredibly easy to falsify the records even with an auditor checking them over. The fraud went back to the 80s so I'm sure many of those records were paper-only and continued to be paper-only for many years later. There's only so much time for an auditor to pull every string. If they don't suspect fraud in the first place, they probably aren't going to find it if it's not obvious. The fraud may have been as simple as her saying she performed a test, making up results, and writing down a list of equipment used along with calibration dates. An inspector looks at the results, sees everything is in spec, looks at the equipment list and sees it's all in calibration, everything checks out but she never performed the test to begin with. Maybe she got caught because someone found that the equipment was in use for other tests at the time she said she performed them or that the equipment was used for a much shorter time than when others ran the same test. When I test something and use calibrated equipment or tools, no one is actually checking to make sure I actually used those specific items. Quality systems kind of fall apart when people straight up lie. They work well to catch mistakes or nonconformances but a straight up lie is hard to detect unless you enforce witness signatures.

Which is sort of the same thing. "I don't want to run this expensive or complicated test because it's stupid" is certainly a kind of cost cutting.

I don't know about how cold deep artic waters may be (I doubt that much), but strength-stress curves are likely why. The easiest way to make something last long and not have unexpected accidents is to overrate it big time - such that any wear would need to become blatant.

To take an ergonomically silly exampke shovel handle could be a three inch diameter of solid steel that can take five metric tons per square centimeter as pressure without bending. If it wears out enough that it could snap by human body weight it would have to be worn quite a bit.

South pole mean winter low is -76F but -128F has been recorded. While the water isn't going to get that temperature, subs need to surface periodically. I bet they've looked at the probability of needing the ability to operate in extreme cold, and -100F is the compromise.

There are plenty of things to control for when designing and producing steel. An important consideration for some applications is the brittle to ductile transition temperature. Some steels have a DBTT around 0­°C, which means that they loose most of their impact resistance below that temp. By adjusting the chemistry, processing methods, and post-processing methods, you can adjust the DBTT of steel down below -70°C. My guess is that they were being paid to supply steel with a DBTT below -70°C, and that the contract included proof testing. The standard testing method would be a Charpy impact test at various temperatures. It sounds like they were making complex castings, so they probably had some non-standard testing requirements.

More info:

https://www.punchlistzero.com/dbtt-ductile-brittle-transitio...

https://knifesteelnerds.com/2018/12/21/why-cold-steel-is-bri...

Likely it has to do with the scaling of the actual property being measured. For example with decreasing temperature, steels become less and less able to resist impact damage. Thus getting hit by something small at cryogenic temperatures is equivalent to being hit by something big at normal temperatures; so if you want to test whether a submarine can survive an impact that would be impractical to simulate in a lab, you could instead cool your test sample down a lot and test it with a smaller, cheaper device.

My knowledge of shipbuilding is limited but I believe the navy suffered quite a bit during WW2 from certain steels undergoing a transition in the low temperatures of the north atlantic that caused brittle fracture. I would imagine testing at ultra low temperatures accelerates the rate at which such brittle fractures can be detected.

It would be interesting to know how cold the ballast tanks (and connected pipes) gets when the compressed air get released. Air going from high pressure to low can quickly drop the temperature, especially if its already at a fairly low point to start with.

IT is entirely possible the requirement was stupid, over-specified, and irrelevant, but that is beside the point.

Brittle fracture toughness for carbon steels (resistance to cracking) gets really bad below about -20 °F. The colder you get, the more things you have to do to keep that toughness up, or else steel will crack like cast iron instead of bending and stretching like it's supposed to.

I come from the pressure vessel industry where impact testing is routinely required at temperatures below -20°F, sometimes at -320 °F for cryogenic applications.

Fracture mechanics and low temperature behavior of steels is a relatively "new" field in engineering, only emerging sometime in the last 80 years, so I can see why the metallurgist may not have known too much about it. Widespread study was kicked off in the US with the Liberty ship disasters:

https://metallurgyandmaterials.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/libe...

If you want to know more about stuff like that, ask away; it was far and away the most interesting part of my mechanical engineering education and career before I switched over to tech :)

If it was a random employee, then I'd agree with you that it would be possible. But she is/was the director of metallurgy at the foundry, so hard to remove her from any responsibility.

That's a giant leap in logic. She wouldn't even save money, the company would. I doubt this was the only test they did on the steel. It might have been that from her perspective she got the same steel over and over again, and just didn't do the work, because she was lazy.

I've operated environmental testing chambers for automotive customers. It's comparatively quick and easy to do the +85C high-temperature testing, but it takes a long time and/or an expensive, oversized refrigeration unit for a chamber and the parts in it to reach the target -40C/F low temperature. -70C/-100F would probably take a very, very long time.

Even in the brutally suspicious automotive industry, it's common to have an operator manually copy the chamber temperature or thermocouple reading to the test report. Especially if you believed that the test requirement was excessive, there would certainly be a temptation to lie and say that the temperature had reached the target.

I wonder how the lie got discovered. Did her successor notice that they were less productive than she had been, because the chamber was slower than what she claimed it could do? Was the chamber incapable of reaching the target temperatures? Did the measured test results come out different?

Other coverage says the tests were run, but fails were reported as passes.

https://www.wavy.com/news/military/navy/metallurgist-faked-s...

Then you would just say "No, I won't do that, we can't offer you this service/product" instead of "Yes, I will do that, pay us and we make it happen", and then don't do it.

Last time I worked I the banking sector, the requirement was not a month, but just a week. It just had to be a contiguous week and not stacked on a banking holiday, or if it was you just needed an extra day. For example if this was going to me my week. I’d have to take Monday off since Thursday is a holiday.

I've seen this happen first hand, albeit with far lower stakes.

I was a wire puller in a factory that refurbished subway cars. High voltage cables cannot have any breaks in insulation because they're carrying a huge amount of power and you could get shorts and fires.

Our supplier frequently shipped damaged cables. Our manager tried working with them to change their packing and shipping method to prevent this, but it still kept happening and it would cause serious delays on the line.

Our manager was under serious pressure from the top staff to straighten this out and would get livid if a new batch of cables came in damaged, often blaming us for improper handling.

Eventually employees learned to "fix" cables coming in with heat shrink and electrical tape to keep manager happy. This was dangerous and when eventually discovered by quality assurance it became a big issue. Manager was moved somewhere else.

> I would imagine a higher up got very angry every time a batch failed.

> After awhile you learn to just keep your head down. Many people don’t feel safe enough to push back. Or they stop questioning after awhile.

Worked at a foundry where a metal lab tech was caught fudging the numbers for this exact reason.

The floor manager would get angry at the tech for telling him the "wrong" mix of alloying elements to put in the melt after the main charge was molten.

In reality, the manager should have been mad at the suppliers sending him shoddy alloying elements of wildly varying quality. Or he should have been mad at the metallurgist for not putting in the correct info w.r.t. the quality of the alloying elements.

Nah, because in the circumstances zz865 describes, taking the time to do the work right would get people mad at you. They don't actually want the work done. They want someone to say that the work was done so that blame won't fall on the higher-ups.

I'm not. I'm just pointing out how "stupid" her defense was.

I don't see that in the linked article (maybe Reader view is hiding content?). What exceptional circumstances is she claiming?

No "exceptional circumstances" were put forth by her defense.

Doctors get sued and lose their license in some cases too.

...especially prison doctors.

Or to take this in a sane direction, does a day go by when a doctor actually gives you the care and tests and advice you need rather than the CYA version?

It's a submarine, -70C means it's been frozen into a colder iceberg than exists on this planet.

I am curious if this is a mitigation for repeated stress cycles or an analogue of metallurgical properties in deep ocean water.

Not in sea water:

> Deep ocean water has a very uniform temperature, around 0-3 °C

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ocean_water

If it results in some one death, it could be considered manslaughter.

I’m curious about the requirement too but I agree that it doesn’t matter. The client wants their steel tested at -100 deg F, so do it. Someone who is a Director of Metallurgy should take pride in delivering the product that was asked for, not in think they know better than the Navy.

This is how we get user-facing error dialogs with the text “This error will never happen!”