Los Angeles Laboratory

LOS ANGELES CAPABILITIES

• Materials & Mechanical Testing Laboratories

  Exponent's multidisciplinary teams help clients understand root causes of mechanical failures and address metallurgical and materials engineering challenges that impact safety, functionality, and performance of products in the petrochemical, power generation, pipeline, and automotive industries. Our lab teams routinely develop custom mechanical and materials testing methods and provide advanced modeling to further support product safety and reliability. Our services include:

  • Failure and fracture analysis (including fatigue, fractography, and computational analyses such as finite element analysis)

  • Corrosion, metallurgical, and materials characterization and investigations and metallographic examination

  • Mechanical and hardness testing

  • Microscopy and spectroscopy (including optical and scanning electron microscopy, and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy)

• Thermal Laboratory

  Our thermal laboratory teams — including chemical and mechanical engineers — support investigations of fires, explosions, and product failures across diverse industries. Exponent teams provide hands-on expertise to determine root causes, address recalls, prevent future incidents, and uncover the insights clients need for manufacturing, petrochemical processing, consumer products, and batteries.

  We support customized and standardized testing, including full-scale mock-up testing and recreations, fluid mechanics and flow loop characterizations, pressurized gas release and high-pressure leak and rupture testing of fluid piping systems, as well as thermal hazard evaluation and ignition testing.

• Electrical Testing Laboratory

  Our electrical testing lab supports clients in addressing safety, reliability, and regulatory compliance, providing critical insights into design and manufacturing processes across the product lifecycle and enabling manufacturers, OEMs, and facility owners and operators to mitigate risk across power systems, electrical machinery, batteries, vehicle electronics, consumer electronics, medical devices, sensors, and more.

  We conduct electrical reliability and safety testing, perform risk analysis for electrical system designs, and conduct testing to failure based on statistical sampling. Our custom services include reverse engineering, electric and magnetic field modeling, technical prototype system development, electric shock investigations, intellectual property analyses, computer forensics, and product liability testing.

• Battery Testing Laboratory

  Exponent's battery testing lab provides industry-leading expertise to help clients create safe, high-performing consumer electronics, medical devices, and other products. Our multidisciplinary consultants bring deep domain experience, allowing our team to conduct battery teardowns and small-scale battery testing to identify complex failures caused by design flaws, electrical or mechanical abuse, and manufacturing defects. We provide safety and regulatory compliance testing, thermal runaway testing, accelerated lifetime analyses, performance-evaluations, design reviews, thermal assessments, and FDA pre-market testing for medical device batteries.

• User Testing Laboratory

  Our user testing laboratory supports clients in understanding how people interact with products, environments, and complex systems. Our scientists and engineers conduct comprehensive user studies that examine cognitive, perceptual, and physical factors influencing safety, usability, and product performance across various applications, including consumer products, medical devices, and software.

  Leveraging multidisciplinary scientific expertise and proficiency in industry standards and regulatory expectations, our teams design and implement customized testing protocols and analytical methods to generate defensible insights. These studies help improve product safety, inform design decisions, optimize work environments, and provide critical evidence for incident investigations throughout the product lifecycle.

• Aerial Inspections

  Our laboratory team includes three licensed commercial drone pilots who perform field inspections and aerial forensic investigations of equipment failures, structure and wildland fires, as well as landslides and erosional features, providing clients with rapid, detailed assessments of hard-to-access sites and enabling informed decisions about safety, repairs, and risk mitigation. These inspections help clients identify the extent of damage, monitor ongoing hazards, and support investigations with high-resolution visual data. Our capabilities include:  

  • Large area imaging

  • Detailed scene inspections

  • Thermal (IR) imaging