Element’s Charlotte lab makes tensile specimens from turbine blade roots

Daniel Steele keeps a CFM56 high pressure turbine blade on his desk in Charlotte, North Carolina. Speaking in a recent interview, the value stream manager at Element Materials Technology held it up to explain a request that came in from a forging customer: qualify the blades they were forging, using material taken from the blade itself. The part is small, laced with EDM-cut cooling holes, and made of a nickel-based superalloy that Steele describes as hard to machine and hard to test.

Steele has been at the Charlotte lab almost ten years, starting as a mechanical lab technician and now running the machine shop and every destructive test lab on site. The work is testing the FAA requires on flight critical safety components. The end users, he says, are just about every major player in the engine business, plus nuclear qualifications, structural steels and defense work.

The timing is what makes the story worth an operator's attention this month. Deloitte's 2026 Engineering and Construction Industry Outlook, published in November 2025, described a sector where total construction spending had fallen almost 3% year over year by July 2025, with advanced manufacturing and defense standing out as selective growth pockets. Element's Charlotte lab sits squarely in those two pockets, and Steele spent the interview describing a year of new leases, new grinders and new frames.

A cylinder cut from the root of a turbine blade

The specimen Steele's team produces starts as a blank pulled from the root section of the blade by wire EDM. The root is the only region with enough solid material to work with, and even there the geometry leaves very little room.

Steele says he knows of no other lab that low-stress grinds specimens that small. That claim is his, and he framed it as what he is aware of rather than a survey of the market. The lab bought a second wire EDM for the extraction work, plus a small electric tensile frame fitted with an electric resistance furnace so the miniature specimen can be pulled hot.

The engine behind the request is not a niche one. Wikipedia's entry on the CFM56 counts 32,645 engines built as of June 2018 and calls it the most used turbofan aircraft engine in the world, powering the Boeing 737 Classic and Next Generation and the Airbus A320 family. For a procurement director qualifying a blade forging, the question Steele's capability answers is whether the tensile data can come from the actual forged part rather than a separate bar of the same alloy.

Half a thousandth of an inch stops being forgiving

Steele says nearly every aerospace customer the lab serves requires low stress grinding preparation, and that the requirement is central to the lab's approvals in its end-use markets. Grinding a miniature specimen to that standard, he says, is where the difficulty concentrates.

The ASTM standards themselves say subsize specimen machining and testing is more difficult, Steele notes. The lab answered by buying the right size grinding wheel, new tooling, and turning and grinding capability specific to these dimensions.

The depth of testing behind a CFM56 component is visible in the engine maker's own history. CFM International said in a February 2002 press release, published by GE Aerospace, that the advanced high pressure compressor in its Project TECH56 program had logged more than 335 hours of testing at GE's Lynn, Massachusetts facility, with more than 1,430 data points recorded on a single build. A plant manager reading that release sees why a lab qualifying a blade forging is expected to hit tolerances a general machine shop would call unreasonable.

The EDM capability has been building since a $3.2 million investment in 2019

The extraction method did not appear this year. Aerospace Manufacturing and Design reported in March 2019 that Element had invested $3.2 million at the Charlotte lab in elevated temperature tensile, creep and stress rupture, and microstructural evaluation, in response to rising aircraft and aero engine production. The equipment list in that report included two CNC grinders, three CNC lathes, 39 creep and stress rupture frames, two EDM plunge machines and an elevated temperature tensile frame.

Charlotte was the first Element laboratory to install EDM plunge machines, according to Aerospace Manufacturing and Design, which let it extract cylindrical specimen blanks for the first time. Rick Sluiters, then Element's EVP Aerospace, said in that report that the spend positioned Charlotte as a center of excellence for aerospace testing on the US east coast.

Steele picks up that thread. The lab has added more plunging EDMs, he says, a method some of its prime customers use and one he calls a best practice for pulling blanks from nickel-based superalloys. Six years of practice on that equipment is what an operator is buying when the miniature specimen job lands in Charlotte.

Creep and stress rupture frames fill a lease signed in January

The office Steele recorded from is part of a new lease the lab took on in January. He described the expansion in square footage terms.

The space is being outfitted with creep and stress rupture machines, tensile frames and machining equipment. Two five axis grinders were installed in the shop this year, a new capability for the lab, and Steele says the team is onboarding CBN grinding because it shortens cycle times. He put the machine count in plain numbers.

Those figures are Steele's, given in the interview, and no outside source in this reporting confirms them. The direction of spend does match what executives across the sector told PwC. In a November 2025 report drawing on its Future of Industrials Survey of more than 500 C-suite executives, PwC said 56% of engineering and construction executives plan to significantly increase investment in AI and automation over the next three years, and 42% expect to boost spending on robotics.

Element's money is going into grinders and load frames rather than robots. For a VP of operations at an engine supplier, the practical effect is the same: more creep frames in Charlotte means less waiting for a slot on a test that can run for months.

A soft construction market bounds the growth story

The broader numbers cut against any lab describing a big year. Deloitte, in its November 2025 outlook, reported that by July 2025 total US construction spending had declined almost 3% year over year, led by commercial construction down 8.2% and manufacturing construction down 7%. Deloitte also cited persistent inflation, elevated interest rates, tariff uncertainty and acute labor shortages squeezing margins and schedules.

Manufacturing construction spending fell 7% year over year by July 2025, according to Deloitte, while Element was adding floor space. That is the honest frame for the Charlotte expansion: it is happening inside a shrinking manufacturing build environment, in one of the few segments Deloitte singled out. The same report projected investment in structures swinging from a 2025 decline to growth of nearly 1.8% in 2026, with advanced manufacturing and defense among the areas hinting at selective growth.

Steele's answer to the soft market is the backlog he expects. With creep and stress rupture frames coming online, he says the lab can fill its entire capacity with work, and it recently won a project for extremely low stress creep testing, a fit for the direct load frames he oversees. The lab also runs long-duration R&D testing, which does not follow the construction spending cycle.

Server-bypassing rooms for defense data

Part of the Charlotte workload is ITAR and EAR restricted. Steele says the lab has a local deputy dedicated to that compliance, and special rooms set up to bypass the internal server so no sensitive data is stored in a nonrestricted area. He mentioned prior work on missile projects as one example of the end-use markets the lab supports.

For a CIO at a defense prime evaluating outside labs, the isolated-room setup is the detail that matters more than the frame count. Steele put it simply: the lab wants to be available for whatever customers need, and takes that seriously.

The bespoke work follows the same posture. Steele says when a customer asks for something the lab has never done, his team's question is how to make it happen rather than whether it can be done, citing strain to failure tensile methods and specimen geometries the lab had never manufactured before. Routine work runs under statistical process control, and any customer question gets an engineer assigned to it.

What Steele wants from customers before the frames fill

The ask Steele closed with is operational. If a customer can tell Element what work is coming, he says, the lab can reserve capacity, turn results faster and resolve fewer questions at inception. That is the lever a procurement director at a forging house or engine supplier can pull now, before the new creep frames are booked.

The milestone to watch is the one Steele set himself: the machine network he described reaching its year-end target, with creep and stress rupture capacity fully online. If that lands, Charlotte enters next year with the miniature blade-root specimen work and a creep bench large enough to absorb the qualification programs Deloitte's November 2025 outlook expects advanced manufacturing and defense to keep generating.