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Title
Forensic Engineering: Learning from Failures
Category
general
UUID
3979719ae3a44c7787c45f3bb56b480b
Source URL
https://learningforlife.tudelft.nl/forensic-engineering-learning-from-failures/
Parent URL
https://learningforlife.tudelft.nl/our-courses/business-and-management/cybersecu...
Crawl Time
2026-03-23T11:26:17+00:00
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Forensic Engineering: Learning from Failures

Source: https://learningforlife.tudelft.nl/forensic-engineering-learning-from-failures/ Parent: https://learningforlife.tudelft.nl/our-courses/business-and-management/cybersecurity-risk-safety/

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For instructor paced courses this is the length of the course.

For self-paced courses this is the length of the course if you spend the amount of time per week as specified. You're free to go faster or slower as you see fit.

6 Weeks - Effort 3 - 4 Hours per week

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Don't let good failures go to waste! Identify the causes of failure and use this knowledge to enhance safety and improve performance.

What do collapsed buildings, infected hospital patients, and crashed airplanes have in common? If you know the causes of these events and conditions, they can all be prevented.

In this course, you will learn how to use the TU Delft mind-set to investigate the causes of such events so you can prevent them in the future.

When, for instance, hundreds of hospital patients worldwide got infected after having gall bladder treatments, forensic engineering helped reveal how the design and use of the medical instruments could cause such widespread infections. As a result, changes were made to the instrument design and the procedural protocols in hospitals. Learning from failure in this case benefitted patient health and safety across the world.

After taking this course you will have an understanding of failures and the investigation processes used to find their causes. You will learn how to apply lessons gained from investigating previous failures into new designs and procedures.

The TU Delft Forensic Engineering mind-set involves recommendations for:

The course uses case studies from Building Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and Biomechanical Engineering. All of these provide great examples that illustrate the approaches and highlight technical and procedural causes of failure. You'll find that not only is it crucial, but it's also exciting to learn from failures.

This course is most useful for:

This course has been designed by TU Delft's international experts on safety issues, failure investigations and forensics. Arjo Loeve, Michiel Schuurman and Karel Terwel are members of the TU Delft Forensics community, the Delft Safety & Security Institute and the CLHC Expertise Center for Forensic Science and Medicine. - Details

##### Course Syllabus:

Module 1: Introduction to Forensic Engineering\ You will learn what Forensic Engineering is and why it is important. Furthermore, you will be introduced to basic concepts such as lifecycles of constructed facilities, failure, and damage.\ \ Module 2: The Forensic Engineering Investigation\ You will learn the basic steps of a Forensic Engineering process and how the TU Delft mind-set can help to perform these steps in a factual, reliable and systematic way.\ \ Module 3*: Case from Civil Engineering\ You will learn about various structural failure mechanisms and you will practice setting hypotheses for structural failures.\ \ Module 4*: Case from Aerospace Engineering\ You will learn about the failure mechanism fatigue in airplanes and how you can test to see whether this occurred.\ \ Module 5*: Case from Biomechanical Engineering\ You will learn about contamination of medical instruments and how technical and procedural aspects play a role.\ \ Module 6: Course debriefing\ In this week, the outcomes of the different cases from Modules 3-5 are revealed. Best practices and tips for the future are discussed and some results and contributions from participants are put in the spotlight!\ \ *Modules 3-5 will be offered at the same time, to allow students to choose or prioritize their preferred module(s) based on their main areas of interest. - Qualifications

##### Chartered Engineering Competences

All our online courses and programs have been matched to the competences determined by KIVI’s Competence Structure, a common frame of reference for everyone, across all disciplines, levels and roles.

These competences apply to this course:

This is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that runs on edX.

##### Prerequisites

Secondary school (high school)

This course is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Our MOOCs are delivered on edX.org and are open to all. They include video lectures, readings, assignments, and community discussions. Content is free, with optional certificates and additional exercises available for a fee.

\ Tree House of Failures.

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