Why weight drives aerospace material selection, aluminum, titanium, and composites and where each is actually used in an airframe, and how materials are qualified and certified before they fly.
This module starts from why aerospace material selection is dominated by specific strength, fatigue resistance, and temperature range in ways most mechanical design is not, then works through where aluminum, titanium, and composites are each actually the right choice on a real airframe and why none of the three has replaced the other two. It closes on how a material earns the right to fly at all: the building-block testing pyramid, design allowables, and the certification requirements — like demonstrated damage tolerance — that connect material behavior directly to maintenance and inspection.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a material qualified from one supplier's process is not automatically airworthy from a different supplier, even with identical nominal chemistry — reasoning Module 16's maintenance content and this program's certification capstone both return to directly.