MMPDS material certification and FAA aerospace qualification process

60+ pages of Ti-6Al-4V data in MMPDS; 10 heats × 10 samples minimum for statistical process control. The bottleneck for any new AM process entering aerospace.

If you have joints — when they first made these you did have little tubular porosity and it was weak. They spent about six months or a year before they finally found ways to get rid of that. Now they are a hundred percent dense, which is why Boeing's interested. They can make a hundred percent dense titanium bars. [Tom passes a sample around the class.] I'm interested in tensile bars. I pointed out to you this MMPDS — you cannot apply something on a commercial aircraft unless you follow the material properties in this book put together by the Defense Department and the Federal Aviation Administration. Titanium 6 aluminum 4 vanadium, which that alloy is, goes from page 556 to the next alloy at 5-120. So I've got over sixty pages of fatigue curves, tensile curves, and your material must meet these specs or you can't put it in an aircraft.