The aluminum industry has had considerable success recently in developing new, higher performance products for the aerospace industry. An alternative, and complementary, means of reducing the weight of airframe structures is to tune the property balance of these high performance alloys to the design and manufacturing requirements of each major airframe part or even to specific panels within each part. Given the time constraints of the airframe design and development process and in particular the early point at which the materials and technology choices are made, this approach implies the ability to develop rapidly and reliably an optimized material.

Compared to traditional development methods, today’s accelerated product optimizations increasingly involve concurrent engineering. Product development targets need to be clearly defined very early in the development cycle, necessitating both close collaboration with airframers and an understanding of the design drivers; integrated product teams (IPTs) constitute an efficient way of thus focusing developments. In addition, the development process itself needs to be accelerated. A thorough theoretical understanding of property variations as a function of alloy composition and processing is a pre-requisite; methods such as computer-aided metallurgical modeling can be used both to formalize this understanding and to accelerate its application. They also enable rapid adaptation of products to the slight changes in technical target that invariably occur during the development phase of an aircraft. Finally, the industrialization and qualification requirements need to be considered at an early stage in the product development cycle.

This contribution will describe some recent alloy-temper optimizations for airframe applications, focusing on the property balances achieved but also on the background development methodology. Potential further tuning of such products will also be discussed.