The occurrence of failures has a major impact on quality, production and environmental health and safety areas of human and industrial activity. Understanding, analyzing and preventing failures result undoubtedly in the reinforcement of expertise and deep knowledge that constitute significant contributors of continuous quality improvement and society benefit.  The scope of this session aims to address and report several paradigms and case studies, where the investigation of fracture and failure of materials and components lead to the exploration and understanding of the failure process as a series of logical/natural stages and interactions of microstructure, properties, processing and environmental/operation conditions, exhibiting a “cause-and-effect” type relationships. The study areas of the Session are mainly focused (but not limited) on critical industrial sectors, such as metallurgical, mining, chemical, manufacturing and automotive. 
The following (but not limited) representative topics are included in the

Session: 

1. Failure and microstructure relationships
2. Genesis of damage at nano-, micro- and meso-scale level
3. Fractography as failure investigation method
4. Texture-failure interactions  
5. Modeling of degradation processes with experimental validation
6. Failures in modern manufacturing
7. Innovative approaches in failure investigation and failure analysis (e.g. AI, machine learning, etc.)
8. Corrosion and environmentally assisted damage
9. Degradation of historical materials and components
10. Process based philosophy and lessons learned approach