High Energy Hydro Forming Technology for Aerospace Part Manufacturing

High energy hydro forming (HEHF) is a high strain-rate deformation process used to form a variety of metal products including flat sheet, plate and tube for making various aerospace components from aluminum to high strength alloys. HEHF has been derived from the fact that hydro forming energy is generated due to the detonation of an explosive underwater. Since the early 1950s, aerospace companies in the United States started exploring this technology. Ultimately, explosive forming technology has gradually returned to the manufacturing industry, especially for aerospace applications due to the addition of powerful finite element modeling simulation tool to the forming analysis prior to actual forming. HEHF has been explored by the metal forming industry for implementing this technology, especially in the aerospace industry for producing complex parts of various metal products. This paper presents various manufacturing process steps applied methodically with finite element analysis for the technological development of producing engine lip skin to meet the engineering design requirements for commercial airplanes. Full scale forming development trials were successfully completed and verified the reproducibility of the forming processes with three replicate full scale lip skin parts of the same product geometry.