WEBINAR: Reinventing Defense Materials - Thermoplastics at the Tactical Edge

• Why Skunk Works developed HX5 and how it enabled key performance goals
• The role of thermoplastics in modernizing defense systems across air, sea, and space
• How advanced materials improve logistics, reduce weight, and enhance survivability
• Why legacy materials are no longer sufficient for emerging mission requirements
• What defense primes need to consider to future-proof their platforms

Moderator

Jeremy Smith

Business Development Manager

Alpine Advanced Materials

Speakers

Frank Cappuccio

Former EVP/General Manager, Skunk Works

Read more about Frank

David Vos

Fellow Emeritus (Retired), Lockheed Martin

Read more about David

Webinar Transcript

Jeremy Smith

Alright. We're going to go ahead and get started here. First of all, thank you all for joining us today. And for those of you who are watching after we record, we appreciate you tuning in to see what we're talking about today. Our webinar is going to focus on defense materials and developing new defense materials. Joining us today will be, some Lockheed Martin, kind of legends that, we're part of the development and implementation of a unique material that we believe will be an interesting story for you all.

So just before we get started, I want to, take a couple, take a moment to do some housekeeping. This webinar is being recorded. It will be sent out to you following today's presentation. There will be a Q&A session after the, after our discussion. So there's a chat box that you can enter questions, and I will address them after the end of the session.

So thank you all again for joining. I'm going to first introduce myself and then our esteemed panelists. My name is Jeremy Smith. I am the business development manager here at Alpine Advanced Materials. I've been here for almost four years now, covering all of our markets. And excited to talk to our esteemed guests today. So with that, first I'd like to introduce Frank Cappuccio, the former executive vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Skunkworks.

Frank, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Lockheed Martin skunkworks?


Frank Cappuccio

Well, see about myself. I've been in the news industry about 35 years. I have really three career paths in the industry. First started with Sikorsky, doing the weapon control systems for the, CH, 53 helicopter, mostly during the entire Vietnamese war.

Then went to work for a company called armor. That particular point did work with tactical missiles. Pershing missile. Lance missile. I actually did work on the Atlas missile in an area navigation system and with the area navigation system. Got me into introduced to Lockheed Martin. Got hired by the, Kelly Johnson to go to the Skunk Works to be one of the original, pioneers of stealth on the Have Blue program, which later became the 117 program.

So what is skunkworks? You know, skunkworks is kind of a unique place. It's a company that's been around for 80 years. Everybody picks up the name, and, you know, there's a lot of a lot of works programs going on right now. But basically its role was to really provide classified products and technology to the US government.

It was never a profit center. When I was running. It was never a profit center. It was only, a center to develop parts and components, things like, you know, the U-2, the SR-71, the, Sea shadow, which most people don't know. We built ships. We actually built something called a Sea Shadow. We actually built the submarine.

We did something called Desert Hawk and a whole bunch of others. So it's an exciting place to work. And based upon the work we did there, I wound up, basically being tapped to be the program manager on the X 35 program, bringing the skunkworks assets to the table, saying, okay, so how do we how do we win this important competition?

So that's me. That's who I am. 


Jeremy Smith

Thanks, Frank. Appreciate the info. Also joining us is, former Lockheed fellow, now retired David Vos. David, why don't you tell us about yourself and your work at Lockheed? 


David Vos

Thanks, Jeremy. So I was with Lockheed about 35 years. I said, oops, I'm not showing video, am I? There we go. So I started with, like, you know, actually with IBM Federal Systems in, in 84.

And that was in a Owega facility. So the federal system was turned into, purchased by Loral, and then that got purchased by Lockheed Martin and that entity, the the Owega facility became part of Rotary Mission Systems. So the mission systems part portion of that that I was involved in with was a lot of processors and electronic warfare receiver sets.

So the boring part of my job was I sat in upstate New York for 35 years. The exciting part of my job, and the reason I tolerated all that, is because they brought me really interesting work. I've got, fingerprints on about 50 different, Lockheed Martin platforms in the DoD inventory over the last 35 years. So that's kind of me and and and, well, that's that's RMS in the nutshell.

And then for myself, I started off as a thermal analyst for the space shuttle, general purpose computers. And, from there, expand it out into the rest of the physical environments. The Mil std 810 or DL160, physical environments, structures and and and so on and so forth. And from there branched into system integration. And then as part of the system integration, branched out into a lot of the helicopter platforms and, UAV platforms.
And then finally, in the last 15 years as a fellow, I turned my focus a little bit more toward, materials and processes for weight and cost reduction. So that's that's what I got. 


Jeremy Smith

That's a perfect segue. And, just a side note for any of our listeners in upstate New York. There is nothing personal there.


David Vos

But you live there. You know what I'm talking about. 


Jeremy Smith

Yeah. Oh. So, as, I mentioned earlier, our discussion today is going to really center around the development of a new material for the defense application landscape. So we want to take a step back and look at what traditional defense materials were at the time of the onset of this development, around 2010 or in that in that time frame.

Traditional lightweight materials. So we're going to exclude stainless steel. We're going to include some magnesium, some of the more exotic and focus on the more commonly adopted alloys and other materials for the traditional defense applications, whether it's a small component or large structures. What you had was typically three alloys, sets of aluminum, your 6000 series, your 7000 series, your 2000 series, each of which had their own unique advantages and challenges, 7000 series being your highest specific strength.

However, it had a little bit of environmental susceptibility, so it required some, lengthy process treating to get it to be, longer lasting in tough environments like what you would see on the F-35, which went from hot, cold, dry, wet salt, no salt. Pretty much everything that there could be an environment, it would be exposed to.

So those structures needed to be well hardened. You also have your titanium, which are a common, high specific strength material. And the challenges with titanium is, is really the forging aspect can be lengthy and costly. And for all your machine metals or cast metals, your production rate is fairly low, compared to some of these systems where you're wanting to deliver several thousand annual, the capital, you basically industrial base that you need to produce that is significant.

The newer kind of material that the if here in the landscape at the time was thermoset composites. Thermoset composites are essentially, pre-pregged, oven cured, matrix systems housing, whether it's carbon or glass or other fibers within to get you an ultra high specific strength. However, these processes, again, were a low production rate. There was cost involved with the material, and the tooling was either significant or took a long time to develop.

So the, at the time, there was a lot of available materials, however, with each advantage and challenges. The Lockheed Martin skunkworks team wanted to set out and say, what can be done? What else is out there in the materials landscape, and can we develop something that kind of fits the bill that, well, maintain some of the advantages of these materials, address addresses, some of the challenges.

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to, Frank and have him kind of talk about the approach that Lockheed Skunk Works took at the time to develop the what was called apex material. Now the HX5 material and walk us through the development cycle. 


Frank Cappuccio

Well, when I got I got moved down from the corporate offices, to really go back and look at the X-35 program with the objective of saying, okay, what does it take to win?

And it became obvious that the government requirements for low cost, high rate production really required a, a rethink about materials. We just couldn't get there. The composite efforts that I worked on on the F-22 program or the YF-22 program, the thermoplastics, they really fell short of expectations. They cost they cost too much money.

We never got the weight savings that we really wanted. We were looking for weighting, so we never got the weight savings. We ran into a series of tooling issues that really dragged out the schedule for delivery. And basically, you know, those combinations that can we rethink? Is there something else in the marketplace? We put a couple of good PhD guys involved, John Barnes and General Dr. Slade, and we said, okay, give us something that's in the realm that can accomplish what we want.

And we established five goals. We said, look, okay, number one, you have to have the tensile equivalent of at least 6061 aluminum bare minimum as close to as you can. Number two, you have to have a we have to have the capability of coming up at a low cost injection molding material. We don't want to get hung up with massive tooling that we don't have to.

We want to with turnaround. We we absolutely need better corrosion materials. We need corrosion properties that were resistant to typical aircraft fluids, whether that be, you know, fuel, hydraulic fuel and environmental hot cold weather, sand abrasion, stuff like that. We really wanted something that was chemically inert, and that was important because if we wanted to attach RCS materials to it, we wanted to make sure that it was coatable as opposed to going through another pre lay process on some of the scans for low observability.

And we really wanted something that was thermally stable, in across a wide range of environments and a hell of a lot better than aluminum and titanium. So those were the five goals we set up for this team of young kids. We didn't tell them it was impossible to do. We we gave them. We gave them a budget.

Well, we did them. We gave them a budget, and we gave them a project number. So each one was able to identify to the program itself, which was the HX5 program at the time, as opposed to identifying with the F-35 program. It was a splinter group was it was basically and was a black program in terms of both the investment and the matrix.

And with that, they've made a bunch of accomplishments. And, came up with what we have right now that Alpine is using. So that's kind of like the history, very simple. Understand the problem, identify the characteristics you want, get a get a team of guys together that don't really quite know it's impossible, but pretty much think maybe you could do it and, give them the money.
And that's how it came about.


Jeremy Smith

How long was the development cycle? Frank? 


Frank Cappuccio

We we started, I would say we had a piece in our we had a piece in our hand in less than nine months piece. Okay. We had something that I would call relatively, Quality to show a customer in, in about 12 months. And by 15 months, we had a part that we felt comfortable we could start doing testing, testing in the sense of did it meet the character?

The fit didn't meet the five goals we wanted, and could we put it into an environmental chamber and do that? So the whole process took somewhere about, you know, I would say 15 months was, from scratch. And that's when we had something we could really start doing the testing in detail and start the characterization process.


Jeremy Smith

That is rapid from conception to part in hand.

Talk to us a little bit about the characterization process and what is required for a high durability or a high, you know, kind of, requirement scale, certification.


Frank Cappuccio

The biggest requirement we had relative to certification and testing really was established by, at that time, F 35. JPO team, two of which had material.
Material. The guy was named Franks. Material people in Wright-Patterson. They were kind of cumbersome to work with. I'll be honest with you. They had their typical for those people in the structures business. No. Mil Handbook five, which is a characteristic book that you mean it's been around since the old NACA. But those people in the audience that remember NACA reports form a form and link to NASA.

They wanted a very extensive testing program across a spectrum of stuff. The obvious was repeatability was the first thing. Can I make the parts the same? Homogeneity. The is the material homogeneous and we're I I'm do whatever mechanical properties we have to be continuous environmental. Could it take the salt spray humidity mill standard and that I need to I think they through mills standard ten at us which is a missile spec.

It's not even mill 5400 which is an airplane spec, they wanted to make sure it wouldn’t outgas, so we have to do antennas. So when we laid out that plan, it turned out we said, okay, if we perfect information, if we could do this, would you certify that we can put on the aircraft?

And that's when the rub hit. Well, we want you to spend at least one and a half, two years more of testing, certification, testing. And we did start the process. But what we found out was, two years got us beyond the CDR Point on the X 35 program, where we could specify. So we had a big disjoint and we went back to the government.

We asked them to redo some of the requirements, and the answer was no. You know, continue a research program. We're interested in the project, but you're not going to get it on the X 35 program. Even though we made parts for it and we did some testing of it, but, so the real the real big issue with any of these parts in the military environment is to make sure your customer buys into the certification and characterization part.

Yeah. Having said that, Alpine has done a tremendous amount of work in the certification process, in the characterization process, which really gives us a big leg up than when we started with just a dream and a couple of couple of young kids wanting to make a difference. 


Jeremy Smith

Well, thank you, Frank. That, actually brings us right into our next topic, which is the result that was developed and then characterized out of both Lockheed and the team at Alpine since it's been, acquired by the Alpine Group.

The results in the HX5, as Frank mentioned, the five major problem sets they address pretty head on. So it's, an anti corrosive but easily coatable material. Taking off two of their, problem sets. It's a lightweight, high temperature capable material. The tensile strength is almost the exactly nominal is 6000 series. And after the characterization path the design allowable is are essentially equivalent to 6000 series aluminum at half the density.

So it's about an 80 plus percent, specific strength bump. And it's a very thermally stable material. So over, broad range of, temperature, we've tested it from -65 all the way up to 250 F for full mechanical profile. And over that profile, it's coefficient of thermal expansion is very low. It's about one six that of 6000 series aluminum, even lower or even a better share against thermoset and other carbon filled thermoplastic materials.

So it's an incredibly thermally stable material, which is, great for, an aircraft that's going to go from hot and cold to hot and wet to dry and cold, for satellites that go hot side cold side, anything, it's going to see a wide range of temperature in its cycle. HX5 is an incredibly stable material. It also passes outgassing requirements for, space applications.

And then we've done extensive characterization, as Frank mentioned, on the material, because it's required for aerospace applications. It's a, you know, it could be anything from a small specific material property to a broad stroke of material properties. We have currently 100 plus test reports, characterizing the material from everything from mechanical performance, electrical conductivity, thermal performance, it's performance in its melt temperature.

So basically the processing performance of the material, we've done all the FAR 25.853 testing for commercial aerospace, which is your flame smoke tox passes, all of that. It's got some pretty impressive total and total ionization dosage resistance. It's been tested up to 5 million gamma, rads with minimal degradation. Another thing, Frank mentioned the the smoke that an aerospace component goes through.

You've got jet fuel, you've got, hydraulics. You've got in some cases, there's now a hydrogen being introduced, you've got, caustic chemicals. And back to commercial aerospace. Believe it or not, Coca-Cola is something we had to test for the degradation of the material, all of which HX5 because of the the work that the Lockheed team did is inert, too.

It's hardened against tough environments. And then I think one more thing that's unique that the Alpine's done with the characterization of HX5 is not just understanding what the properties are, it's how to apply those properties in a design environment. What we do that's unique in our design process is anisotropic effect capability. So you see the the material properties listed here, specifically the tensile strength and the coefficient of thermal expansion.

Those are anisotropic properties, meaning that value is parallel to the flow of the carbon fill of the material. But you're going to have a mix because you're injection molding. This it is a fluid, dynamic process. You're going to have a mix of orientation or vectors of those carbons. Alpine actually has the ability to take those anisotropic nature, produce a carbon vector map, and run through high fidelity, analysis for mechanical properties for its electrical, EMI electromagnetic, shielding properties and for its, basically its thermal coefficient of thermal expansion properties based on the carbon flow.

So, to Frank’s point characterizing material is, is paramount when you're trying to introduce a new material, a new process, to a highly certified, vehicle, whether that's airborne vehicle, land vehicle, seaborne vehicle, there's a lot that gets going, is required to understand how can this be used in this application. And thankful to the team at, Lockheed for doing their work.

And thanks to our team here at Alpine for really trying to go out and understand what the material can do and allowing us to design effectively with it. So with that, I'm going to move into some of the original applications that the HX5 was used for at Lockheed. And thanks to David Voss, who's going to join us here and walk us through a couple of the opportunities that we can talk about.

I'll detail at a high level some of the opportunities that we aren't necessarily allowed to speak publicly on. But, David, why don't you first tell us about the remote processor unit for the S 97?


David Vos

Okay, I'm going to dial back a little further in history. I first met the skunkworks team, in an integrated product team meeting.

Corporate meeting, back in 2008. And at dinner one night, we were talking about, you know, we've got this really cool material, but we need more applications, more places that we can use it. And as Frank had just mentioned, it's difficult to break into the primary and secondary structures applications. It's a much lower barrier to entry for the electronics and enclosures and racks, and that's where the product set was for a rotary mission systems.

So that gave me the opportunity to look for different opportunities to bring it in. And one of the things I said over my career is some of the, some of the best technology breakthroughs are precipitated by some of the highest levels of desperation. So what happened with the Rpu? This was for the S 97 while I was still in, in experimental development, we were approached and said we need a, five slot processor box and it cannot weigh more than 8 pounds.If it weighs more than 8 pounds, you cannot get on the aircraft. Well, if you look at the available catalog items for a five slot chassis, it's going to be between 15 and 16 pounds off the shelf. So we had this challenge to cut the weight in half. How are we going to do that? So our team looked at it and said the material.

So the first step here was the HX5 material was half the density. So that helped a lot. But the chassis is only about 10% of the weight of the box. So we needed to do a little bit more than that. So what we did is we, we went through a new, cooling standard. Yeah.

I've lost the... Vita 48.8. Okay, there we go. Sorry about that. Retirement's kind of fun and comes up with you. So Vita 48.8, was it we were able to, change the mechanical architecture of the box. And we also brought in additive metal heat exchangers, within the cards themselves. So between the chassis weight reduction and the more efficient packaging of the electronics, we were able to save, roughly 45% of the weight reduction also reduce a lot of the thermal, thermal load path to, to make it more efficient in the same process.

So we did get to get on the aircraft. We did get to stay on the aircraft. It has been flying since 2015. So that is, major success story. And the other good feedback on that is if you talk to the team, you know, they don't hear much about the RPO because it just works. 


Jeremy Smith

Well, that's great.

How many RPUs are on onboard? 


David Vos
Generally there's a redundant system, so there's generally two. 


Jeremy Smith

All right. Well thank you for that, David. Let's talk about the Common Mission processor, which is a similar story but for a different platform.


David Vos

It’s absolutely correct. And this one has gone into production. So, you know, the story about the weight savings.

Again, this was a there's two processors per aircraft. It has. And their requirement was it had to weigh less than 16.0 pounds. And again if you did an off the shelf comparison for a 8 to 10 slot, chassis processor, then you'd be looking at 30, at least 30 pounds for that system. So we're again looking at cutting the weight in half.

So the work that we had done on the Rpu was transferable. We got to, an a new, configuration for it. That configuration was qualified in, 2017, the first flight of the history of HH-60W was occurred in 2019. So it has been in flight and in production since, about 2019. And again, it's a very difficult environment.

One of the most difficult environments on that is the 50 cal mini guns that are right next to the nose wind up being about two feet of them. The muzzle blast is about two feet away from where our processor sits. So it's it was an exciting design challenge. And also, a most respected mission that those, those people were on.


Jeremy Smith

Well, thanks for that insight, David. Just a quick note on some other applications that we can't necessarily discuss. There are some satellite applications that Lockheed used, for some black comm satellites, missile bulkheads. There's also some gunner seats that were in development. There was a lot that they that the Lockheed team had used and saw this applicable to pretty much every platform that they had produced, unfortunately, some of which are just still not able to be, publicly discussed as they are today.

So, David, was there anything that we missed on, you know, kind of the implementation process for a new material? 


David Vos

Nothing that we missed, but something worth emphasizing is, as Frank had alluded to with MMPDS, formerly Mil-HDBK-5. There's a lot of there's a lot of characterization that that's required to go into that. Our philosophy within RMS was not to try to introduce it as a primary, secondary structure, but introduce it as an electronics enclosure.

And the barrier to empty as much entry is, is much lower for that. So I think my encouragement to the folks on the webinar is find the right entry point. And, and that will give you a higher probability of success. 


Jeremy Smith

Well said. Thank you, David. So kind of wrapping back to where we started this conversation at and looking at the next gen defense materials with a new introduction to the table.

And that's the HX5 being an injection molded thermoplastic that can be used in the same realm as your 6000 series aluminum, your thermoset composites. Its advantages with this material landscape is it's a very high specific strength, again, almost 80% higher than your 6000 series aluminum, a very high production rate, injection molding can produce several hundred parts per, per hour per day.

It's environmentally inert. It has all the, you know, the five major points that the Lockheed team set out to, to tackle with it. And if you had noticed in those last two slides, both boxes that Lockheed developed for the rotorcraft Pro platforms, we're about a 50% cost reduction in low volume manufacturing, and that only gets better in higher volume applications.

So, the caveat with an injection molded material is tooling is required. Same for thermoset composites. You will need to develop and design a tool accurately, harkening back to understanding your material and being able to design with it appropriately. The characterization that Alpine has done and the Lockheed team had done to understand the material, feed into a higher fidelity design analysis, so that when you are designing that tool, you're designing a tool that is going to work, and the part's going to work out of the tool.

So the last little thing I want to talk about is the where where this applies and where we've seen apply applications for the HX5 since Alpine's been, the, the, you know, global source for HX5, missile components, electronics and avionics, chassis, building on the lessons learned from the S-97 and the HX-60 programs, and excellent EO/, material because it's thermally stable and it has an EMI shielding capability.

That's land based, that sea based, that could be helmet mount, body mount. We do dismounted optics for, kind of, you know, soldier carry items, things where even grams to make a difference and high rate of manufacturing can bring, you know, cost savings to the, the OEM or the end user, as mentioned, as an excellent hardened space material, it's thermally stable, it's gamma hardened, it passes all the outgassing.

And it's a, you know, high specific strength material. So all of those value props are very, very, you know, used in the space industry, something that I'm going to actually get to at the end of this conversation is where we work beyond just the major overall platform space is subscale platform items. And David was right to say, you want to find your right injection point.

And before we got on the call, I was talking about it's the long ball game. You want to find applications that are lower certification, easier path to production and, give you some design points to, to really hit on to start. So connector shells is something that we're actively working on and, something that I'm very excited to talk about next.

Propulsion components. So for high and, you know, large commercial aircraft, for smaller aircraft, for small UAVs, we're doing propulsion components kind of across that range. General. Other tier one, tier two, tier three supplier components, hardware. You know, everything from slides in a galley to slides in an avionics rack, seat components, cabin components, you name it.

And also UAV is the material has great application for high strength to weight ratio in small and large group UAVs. And it's EMI hardening has given it a benefit in, the counter UAS space that we're seeing. Frank, is there anything that I think we need to, or that you think we need to discuss about, you know, the overall landscape for defense applications for a thermoplastic, like HX5?


Frank Cappuccio

No, I think what, I conversation, yesterday with some of the DARPA people, where they're going, they're, you know, based upon what's going on with Ukraine, there is this big need now to, come up with high production,  low cost, whether they be UAV missiles, whether it be UAV, whether it be missiles. So, you know, you're going to see an interest, brewing is to what can I mold fast? The traditional manufacturing techniques, that the, the missile industry has right now is struggling. I mean, it's been a while since they redesigned, rethought out missiles. I think Jassem was the one of the earlier ones where we actually used a material, composite material, where we used a, what I call a big winding machine.

It looked like, the technique that he used to make socks. And we used that and made it make the vehicle to the length we wanted, and we cut the vehicle in half, and then we stuffed it. And you're going to see more and more of that as opposed to the traditional metal stuff that's going on. I believe Dave is right on the money.

Start small. Start with structures that you can make a big difference in, where you can produce a lot of stuff cheaply. UAV is an ideal market for this. If you can get the right point, you're going to get the right UAV that does right mission in the right price point. I mean, you're watching what's happening in in Ukraine, for instance, those cheap little UAV that Iranians are putting out there.

I mean, they launch 5000. They don't care if they lose 2000, 3000 of them. I think that's that's the wave of the future. You're going to see the military slowly go to that, philosophy. And, and the philosophy is one of, you know, the Chinese have the right recipe. It's not about quality. It's about quantity. And I think that's going to make that's going to be an ideal environment for injecting molding of plastic components in the in the industry, even even in the commercial fishing rods, things like crazy things like that.

Snowmobiles. You know, it's a whole other world anyway. So you need. 


Jeremy Smith

Perfect .Thank you for that, Frank. David, any other thoughts about the application of thermoplastics in defense systems?


David Vos

Yeah, I'd like to give one more encouragement. And that is resist the urge for simple material substitution. You have different processes, between injection molding and CNC machining and additive.

So you can't there's a strong temptation across technical and non-technical folks to just do a material substitution and ignore the process that it's being developed with, and so just resist that urge. You can K-code parts, you can use different dash numbers and and you can parallel qualify parts. Is a much better approach than trying to just substitute into an existing drawing.


Jeremy Smith

Perfect. Thank you for that, gentlemen. Thank you both. We'll follow along to the Q&A after I, close out and announce our next episode. So coming soon, we're going to talk with TE connectivity, a, very, very large, connectivity company, a global connectivity company. Recently at the Paris Air Show in June, we joint product launched, three different product families that are, that we've been developing over the last year, replacing their, aluminum or stainless steel shells with HX5 to reduce platform weight.

And we're looking at components that may save, 100 to 300g per set. However, they're repeated, upwards of 100 times across an aircraft. So going back to what David and Frank both said, is it start with something that is, attainable. Has a the correct business case to it has a high volume need. But when you add up the, the, the set per platform, you start seeing significant savings upwards of hundreds of pounds per platform.

So check out TE connectivity. Look out for the announcement of the date of our next webinar. But we're going to have, I believe, the CTO of TE connectivity. Join us and talk about why the material was important, not just from a lightweight perspective, but from its material properties, giving it a benefit to some high power systems and some ruggedized, equipment.

So thank you for that. I'll leave this QR code up here while we do the Q&A session. If you want to join us and learn more, that'll take you to a landing page where you can understand a little bit more, search some more material. Also, you should be able to reach out to me through the website, if you have any questions that we don't address here in the Q&A.

So with that, I think I'm going to start our Q&A session. Our first question here. I think I'm going to point this to Frank. First, from a leadership perspective, how do you build buy in for adopting next generation materials across a large defense program? 


Frank Cappuccio

Well, look, you have to really sit down and, and define what is the value proposition before you do anything technically, what is a value proposition as seen not by your engineers and not seen not by Lockheed, but as seen by the customer. It really starts with that. And if you can't articulate a value proposition, don't start the effort. So In our case, we identified the five things that had to be done because we knew if we can get the weight down, we knew if we could do the A, B, C, D, E the customer would resonate to it.

The best approach to do, you know, is to generate a view graph presentation of three charts. Define the optimistic, optimistic characteristics you think you're going to get with the material or the product. Take it to the customer and say very simply, if I could do this, would you buy it? Very simple. Don't spend any more. Don't spend any more research money.

Defining it,  because you know, I'll give you an example, I'll give you an example. I'll give you a real case real fast. Okay. You know, it's analogous to designing it going into the customer and tell the engineers to do something. They come up with this brand new cup, fantastic cup. They spend all the IRAD money. It got the right handle, right thermal conductivity and all the logos.

You go to the customer and the customer says, hey, this is great, Frank. I'm not buying cups, okay? And meanwhile, old and meanwhile all the money's gone. So the next time you see him, what you have is the cup. So the key is work, the value proposition. Clearly articulate it and then go to the customer, say, if, if I could do all these things, is it attractive?

Would you buy it? And should I spend my money to do it? 


Jeremy Smith

Well said.


Frank Cappuccio

I don't know if that's the leadership part, but I think you get the logic there. 


Jeremy Smith

No, that was that was well put. And I like the cup analogy there. One more question on, direct this one to David. What factors make thermoplastics like HX5 preferable to metals or even thermal sets in extreme environments?


David Vos

So that's going to so for metals it's going to compete on density. And for thermoset composites it's going to compete on cost. So that's how you do the comparison between those two. And and like Jeremy said there's a lot of intrinsic value that's, that's there as far as code ability survivability, sustainability. The coating was really an important factor because like for the electronic enclosures, we needed metal coating to get bonding and grounding.

For the aircraft application, you needed the RCS coatings to, to adhere. Well. So that's one of the magical features of the HX5 is, is the ability to coat it for specifically for the environment that you have. And I think one other thing I'm going to kind of pull back a little bit on were that Jeremy brought up earlier, is the anisotropic, analysis capabilities that reaches backward into the design or into the manufacturing phase that Alpine needs to monitor that during manufacturing, and it reaches forward into the design phase as to how the performance of the part does in the field.

So that tool set is is integral to being able to to carry that material forward. 


Jeremy Smith

Excellent. Thank you. I've got a few more minutes here, so I've got two more questions that I can address. This one I think I'm going to quickly answer. And then David Frank, let me know if you have anything to add to this.

The question is how does Alpine’s HX5 compete or complement other thermoplastics being introduced to aerospace? Perhaps compare and contrast Alpine to Collins and their acquisition of Dutch thermoplastics company. So we'll start with primarily injection molded thermoplastics in the comparison in that space. And the injection molded thermoplastics, your, your higher temperature engineered thermoplastics are going to fall in the PEEK/PEKK/PAEK.

Now they're semi crystalline materials. And then you have some amorphous materials which are, perhaps your Ultems, your PAIs, etc.. HX5 has kind of the advantages of both those families in two, two unique ways. The first way is its chemical inert nature, its environmentally inert nature. It's a semi crystalline, well hardened material for environments, but also caustic fuels, caustic chemicals, irradiation from, you know, gamma radiation, UVA, UVC.

But it's also highly coatable or has a high surface energy for coating and adhesion. Those other semi crystal materials like the PEEK family, etc.. While they are incredibly chemically inert, they struggle to accept coatings and they also struggle to accept adhesion. So in the injection molded thermoplastic realm, that's important for, you know, secondary processes to metalized to the applications we looked at today included metalization, which is an easier, cost effective process with the HX5 with a higher adhesion result than you would get out of those semi crystalline materials.

And your amorphous materials have the opposite to that. They're going to be highly coatable, but are naturally more susceptible to caustic chemicals and radiation. So HX5 exhibiting both of those is where it's unique in that space, in the other major value prop that it brings, it's unique in that the kind of flirting, the amorphous, semi crystalline, realm is a semi crystalline material is going to have a higher structural integrity and consistency.

But typically they have some viscosity issues when they're flowing into a tool. So when you're injection molding material you're melting it and pressurize. You're putting pressure behind it being a cavity. The viscosity matters how thin can you go? What complex geometries can you make? How how large of a part you can make your semi crystal and stuff are there where your amorphous property or amorphous materials, have a benefit.

HX5 has viscosity. That is an order of magnitude less than your semi crystalline materials that are carbon filled. But with that structural integrity of a semi crystalline material. So it's got a unique kind of balance of the semi crystalline amorphous materials that is not seen anywhere else. And taking it one step further, Dutch thermoplastics, or the DTC company has done a lot of work in thermoplastic composites with, continuous fibers.

So what's new in the industry is competing with traditional thermoset materials with ultra high specific strength, using continuous fibers, via automated fiber replacement, autoclave press forming the traditional thermoset or thermoset similar, manufacturing processes for large structures. So the A350, for example, has a lot of thermoplastic composites in, in integrated into it. One of those being a PEEK based thermoplastic composite.

One of the developments that Alpine's working on or forgive me, we're not there to, give you the full open kimono on that, but we are deveLoping a competitor to PEEK/PEKK/PAEK, thermoplastic composites for those reasons that I just mentioned. It's layer adhesion is going to be higher. Its processing capability is going to be higher. The viscosity of the HX5 resin is going to allow the process to be consolidated much easier.

And it's layer adhesion in the application of consolidating tape is going to be higher. Take it a step further putting coatings on it. So for the fuselage of the A350 they need to paint it. I mean it needs to go through several coating processes with the PEEK material is a problem with the HX5. It's going to have a benefit to that.

David, Frank, was there anything I didn't cover in that one? 


Frank Cappuccio

So I think in the case of the Collins that in the case of Collins acquisition, they're trying to increase their market space and a better supplier to, run an alternate supplier, a second source, a supplier to Boeing in some of the composites stuff that's going on for big for big structures.

And so, you know, there's a business case that there that's a little bit more than, than what we're talking about here.


Jeremy Smith

All right. Last question. And I'm going to let you both kind of put an input into this because you both have, more history in the hypersonic market than I do, with the growing market for Hypersonics. Do you see HX5 being introduced into replacing parts using the business model mentioned here via keeping it simple, replacing specific components, kind of targeting low versus going for the full body of a hypersonic ICBM.


Frank Cappuccio

Okay, so let me, first of all, I'll show you, Jeremy, you can give them this report. There's actually there's actually report called scalable thermal attenuation advanced structures for Hypersonics that Alpine did in 23. I'm not sure we can release it, but I'm pretty sure you can make it available to them. And it really looks at how Hypersonics has its own sets of issues when it when it comes to coating materials, obviously the temperature is one of them.

And it's a question of what do you do internal or external parts. I always I've always been in favor on the hypersonic world to do all the internal, all the internal stuff with the composite materials, HX5 materials, and do some of the shell stuff outside with printed, titanium, which, which is an approach that Raytheon is using on some of its stuff.

Will HX5 handle. The answer is can you make a system, an external missile system with HX5? The answer is yes, you can and you can get away with it because the flight times are short. Now, as long as you. Here's a case where you you trade off materials, material characteristics, timelines, associated with flight.

It's like, can you do it? Yes. If if you ever expect to make very cheap, high quality, high quantity missiles, you're going to have to get away from the traditional metal sheets printing stuff. You're going to have to go to some sort of composite material. It might be a  you do both when you come up with a PEEK material that has certain characteristics of strength and then you overlay it.

We haven't talked about the overlaying capabilities that HX5 has, so you may have to overlay it so that you could put the coatings on it. You can go to shielding on it. But I think the the answer is yes. Once you get the US government to commit to Hypersonics, they've been playing with it for like ten years that I'm aware of, maybe almost 15 years now.

Since the first Defense Science Board report that I wrote, talked about the need for speed, against our adversaries. But there's a role for it. There is a role for it. There's a good there's a really good paper that, you know, it says the pros and cons, I mean it, so it tells you what you can do wrong.

It shows some samples that we made. But, there is a pony out there. But but I think picking up on what Dave said, the pony is inside the pony.  Don't  don't fight the heat. Don't fight them. The mach 5 external temperature stuff. Do the internal stuff. Stabilize it, coat it.

I think you can get there. Because what's going to kill you in the long run on the hypersonic stuff is, is the sensor you want to put it the nosecone. And that's, that's really where the rubber meets the road. What kind of sets are you going to put there? How are you going to shielded from heating? There are some scenarios where you can actually there are some work done where you can actually oblate the front to have a front end that really can take the temperatures you want for a certain distance and time.

And at that time it's all ablated away. And the seeker can see and not be jammed. So anyway, long story. Sorry. 


Jeremy Smith

Thanks, Frank. David. Anything that on that. 


David Vos

Yeah. You know, going back to find the right tool for the right job and, you know, make sure you get the right entry point and understanding the material.

So I'm going to put a plug here. Please reach out to us. Please ask us questions. We can help you through that. And specifically what Frank was just talking about. We see this material is very coatable, so we can coat it with ceramic materials. 


Frank Cappuccio

Yes. 


David Vos

So that helps with the the thermal aspect of, of the exterior surface to it.

The other thing is in some of the materials you want high thermal conductivity to reject heat. You know, other applications you want low thermal conductivity to isolate from heat sources. So find the right application and we'd be happy to work with you on that. And and yes, that there there is a play there. 


Jeremy Smith

All right. Well I think that's all the time we have for today.

I want to thank David and Frank for joining us today. They are both retired, and I know that they both have a David's got to go paddleboarding. And I think Frank said he's got to go walk around downtown Fort Worth in a Hawaiian shirt and cowboy boots. So, if you're in Fort Worth, keep an eye out for, that that good looking man.

But, no, we appreciate you guys joining us. Please reach out if you have any questions that we didn't get addressed today. If you have anything that follows on and that, came across that while you're, you know, thinking about this later on, let us know, and look forward to seeing you guys join us when we talk to TE connectivity, about replacing smaller components in the electronics architecture, but components in high volume that bring a unique business case and platform weight savings to, airline operators.

So thank you, David. 


David Vos

Jeremy


Jeremy Smith

Thank you, Frank, 


Frank Cappuccio

Jeremy, one question. How do I get you know, we talked about having all these reports. How do they get those reports for those engineers that really want the copies of reports and what we do? 


Jeremy Smith

That's a great question, Frank. You can either go to our website, you can reach out to me.

We do have, like I said, 100 test reports available to you. Most I will be able to share without an NDA. Some I will require an NDA to be shared on. But. Yeah, please reach out to me, and I'm happy to set up a file transfer to, share all that great reading material with you.

Thank you. Frank.


Frank Cappuccio

Thank you.


Jeremy Smith

All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us, David. Frank, thank you again. Enjoy the rest of your days.


Frank Cappuccio

Okay good. Good seminar. Thank you. Bye bye.