Adhesives, Sealants & Industrial Bonding worked example

Bond Failure Cost at 98% adhesive-attributable failure share: a worked example

What does the result look like when adhesive-attributable failure share reaches 98%? The full calculation is worked below with real intermediate numbers. a quality manager needs to quantify the cost of adhesive or sealant bond failures

The inputs for this scenario

  • Failed bonded assemblies: 9 assemblies (unchanged)
  • Cost per bond failure: 420 $ / failure (unchanged)
  • Adhesive-attributable failure share: 98 % (raised for this scenario; the documented default is 85)
  • Containment/investigation charge: 950 $ (unchanged)

Working through the calculation

  • Applying the documented formula (Adhesive-attributable failure cost = failed assemblies × cost per failure × attributable share) to the inputs above produces each figure below.
  • At this operating point the engine returns 4,654 $ failure for bond failure cost exposure, the number this scenario is built around.
  • At this operating point the engine returns 517 $ / failure for cost per bond failure.
  • At this operating point the engine returns 3,704 $ failure for adhesive-attributable failure cost.
  • At this operating point the engine returns 950 $ for containment/investigation charge.

How this compares with the baseline

  • Against the tool's baseline example, where adhesive-attributable failure share sits at 85% and the headline result is 4,163 $ failure, this scenario comes in 11.8% above the baseline at 4,654 $ failure.
  • A figure at this level is achievable when adhesive-attributable failure share is genuinely sustained, not just peaked for a shift. It assigns a single attributable share to all failures, but root cause usually splits across surface prep, cure, substrate, and adhesive — so the share should come from a real failure analysis, not a guess.

Results at a glance

  • Bond failure cost exposure: 4,654 $ failure (headline result)
  • Cost per bond failure: 517 $ / failure
  • Adhesive-attributable failure cost: 3,704 $ failure
  • Containment/investigation charge: 950 $

Run it with your numbers

  • Every input above is editable in the live Bond Failure Cost calculator, which recalculates instantly and can be shared with the inputs intact.

Last reviewed 2026-05-12.