Titanium industry pioneer Stanley Abkowitz dies

Stanley Abkowitz

The International Titanium Association (ITA) has announced the death of Stanley Abkowitz, an award-winning pioneer in the U.S. titanium metals industry and the founder of Dynamet Technology Inc., on Oct. 29. He was 90 years old.

A 1948 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Abkowitz, who was trained as a metallurgist, helped to establish the American titanium industry through his work on developing Ti-6Al-4V, the widely used alloy that shaped numerous aerospace, industrial, and commercial designs and applications. His work marked the coming of age of titanium's promise as "the wonder metal," according to ITA.

Abkowitz published the first technical paper on the Ti-6Al-4V alloy in June 1954 and published the book Titanium in Industry in 1955. He wrote the monograph The Emergence of the Titanium Industry in 1999.

He won the 2005 ASM Intl. Lifetime Achievement Award and the 1999 William Hunt Eisenman Award, was the first winner of ITA’s Titanium Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, and won ITA’s Applications Development Award in 2013.

Abkowitz holds 24 patents and has authored 60 papers and articles on titanium technology.