A Novelty Procedure to Identify Critical Causes of Materials Incompatibility

Ensuring the expected quality of materials is still a challenge, mainly in order to precisely plan improvement actions that allow for stabilization of the production process. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to develop a novel procedure to identify critical causes of material incompatibility—the causes that have the largest negative impact on material deterioration, and the natural environment. The main originality of this procedure is developing a way to coherent analyse the mutual influence of the many causes of incompatibility of any material, after which the critical causes are identified and a ranking of improvement actions to eliminate these causes is created. A novelty is also developed in the algorithm supporting this procedure, which can be realized in three different ways to solve this problem, i.e.; by considering the impact of material incompatibility on: (i) the deterioration of the material quality; (ii) the deterioration of the natural environment; and (iii) simultaneously the deterioration of the quality of the material and the natural environment. The effectiveness of this procedure was confirmed after tests on 410 alloy, from which a mechanical seal was made. However, this procedure can be useful for any material or industrial product.