FTA Expertise

Matthew A. Adler, PhD
Dr. Matthew A. Adler was hired by LTI in 2017 and is currently Director of Fracture Technology Associates (FTA).

With his PhD in mechanical engineering from Lehigh University in 2009 specializing in fatigue crack growth, Dr. Adler has over 15 years of hands-on experience in experimental fatigue and fracture using FTA software-controlled systems. His graduate dissertation at Lehigh University was under Bob Wei, who was one of the pioneering colleagues that worked with Paul Paris at Lehigh in the 1960s, and is best known for his work in the multidisciplinary field of hydrogen embrittlement. Dr. Adler's graduate dissertation was empirically based and utilized FTA test systems for fatigue crack growth characterization for variable-amplitude fatigue crack growth testing for aluminum 7075-T651 with emphasis on damage prognosis systems for aging aircraft.

Dr. Adler's professional career includes two years as the Director of Advanced Fracture Mechanics at a large-scale production materials testing lab in western Pennsylvania. He also spent eight years as a Damage Tolerance subject matter expert with Jacobs Engineering at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama.

While at MSFC, Dr. Adler supported fracture control requirements for NASA manned spacecraft hardware as directly related to structural integrity, durability, and reliability. This included the design allowables efforts and failure analyses for the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Space Shuttle. This also included design of critical sustained (da/dt) load crack growth tests using FTA in high-pressure gaseous hydrogen after the failure of a poppet valve in the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) that occurred on Endeavor flight STS-126. He earned the NASA MSFC 2010 Software of the Year Award for Surface Crack Potential Difference software he developed for performing surface crack fatigue crack growth testing using  DC Potential Difference System with FTA.

Dr. Adler served as an aerospace manager with Jacobs Engineering for a number of diverse scientific and engineering teams, including teams in Optics & Imaging, Terrestrial Environments, Meteoroid Environments, Space Environments, Contamination Control, In-Space Manufacturing, Materials Test, and Gamma-Ray Astrophysics.

Dr. Adler has been an active leader within the ASTM E08 Committee on Fatigue and Fracture since 2008, including serving as committee chairperson for task group E08.06.02 on Environmentally Assisted Fatigue and E08.03.05 on Data Analysis Methods and providing key contributions to the Slope Determination by Analysis of Residuals (SDAR) methodology which developed into ASTM Standard Practice E3076.