There are many manufacturing methods for metal clad plates, such as rolling, casting, powder metallurgy, and welding. However, the application of these methods is limited to some extent, such as production equipment, the use of composite plates, product specifications and performance, and the economic benefits are poor, and the engineering applicability is not strong. For this reason, major developed countries in the world have invested a lot of manpower and material resources in researching explosive welding technology over the past 20 years, and have applied this advanced technology to manufacture various combinations of metal composite plates, thus overcoming the limitations and disadvantages of the above-mentioned process methods and opening up new avenues for the manufacturing and application of metal clad plates.
Explosive welding is a process that uses explosive detonation as an energy source to coat the surface of selected metal plates with metal sheets of different properties. The new material that combines two or more materials into one using this method is called explosive composite board. The obvious difference between the basic principle of explosive welding and other methods is manifested in high pressure, which exceeds the yield strength of metal materials by more than 10 times. The instantaneous nature of the processing process is on the order of microseconds, and the locality of the load is reflected in the locality and mobility of the collision point. The composite interface is a wavy bond, which is essentially a solid-phase metallurgical bond, completely different from other chemical processes.
Advantages of Metal Explosion Composite Plates
(1) The application performance of explosive composite panels is excellent, they can withstand cold and hot processing, and the thickness ratio of the material combination is not changed during the processing.
(2) The bonding strength of the explosive board is very high. Usually higher than the lower one in the composite material, experiments have shown that shear failure generally occurs in metals with lower strength, which is difficult to achieve by conventional methods.
(3) Strong applicability to material combinations. Explosive welding is completed instantly, and the extremely high collision pressure causes severe deformation of the composite interface. At the same time, there is also a self-cleaning effect of the jet. Therefore, metals or alloys with vastly different physical properties such as melting point, density, strength, and linear expansion coefficient can also form strong wavy metallurgical bonds. Currently, more than 300 material combinations have been achieved, which is incomparable to other methods
(4) Explosion welding has high flexibility in the size, shape, and production batch of the plate surface, ranging from a small area of over ten square centimeters to a large area of over ten square meters. There is no requirement for the thickness ratio of the composite plate, which can be selected arbitrarily. It can be combined with thick tube plates of heat exchangers, shell plates, or even metal foil sheets.
(5) Explosion welding is a cold working process that does not change the composition and state of the material, so the material can be separately processed before composite according to actual needs.
(6) The explosive welding process is relatively simple to operate, does not require complex sets of equipment, and is rich in energy. (7) Under vacuum operating conditions, the lining structure is not suitable for use, especially for large equipment that needs to bear the weight of internal components. The use of explosive composite panels can indeed solve these problems well.
