Rapid Development of a New Kaiser High Strength Al-Li Sheet Alloy for Forming Applications

As Aerospace customers have been challenged with a swiftly changing market and demand for aircraft with superior materials performance, Kaiser Aluminum continues to grow its investment into research and development of these new applications.  Kaiser Research and Development is highly focused on meeting the needs of customers which includes the rapid development of new new processes and products to meet these dynamic materials and market requirements.

This paper discusses the rapid development of a new KaiserSelect® high-strength, thin gage sheet product in collaboration with a major Tier 1 manufacturer for  aerospace applications,  in which incumbent Al-Li type sheet alloys are not available.   The product requirements were high formability, high strength, good corrosion resistance, and low density to meet their anticipated needs and low incoming product cost. The product has been developed to minimize the acquisition costs while maintaining the KaiserSelect® signature performance of providing lower overall manufacturing costs.     For this particular sheet application, lower overall part costs and reduced manufacturing cycles were achieved, as the sheet was designed to have excellent tempered formability.  This increased T Temper formability allowed for the elimination of solution heat treatment, straightening, and associated operations at the facilities of the Tier 1 manufacturer.

Due to near term deadlines for new product designs, rapid development of the new sheet alloy was also required.  Using extensive modeling and a targeted design of experiments that were based on the model results, Kaiser was able to accelerate the development such that in 18 months from the initial concept, full scale product was delivered to the Tier 1 manufacturer for production scale part manufacturing trials.

This presentation will summarize the accelerated development of this new KaiserSelect® Al-Li sheet product, and show some of the properties obtained.