Production of wire reinforced composite materials through explosive welding

Explosive welding is a solid state welding process, which uses a controlled explosive detonation to force two metals together at high pressure. The process has been fully developed with large-scale applications in the manufacturing industry. The explosive bonding technique has an ability to bond a variety of similar and dissimilar materials, and has been applied to fabricate the clad materials and some composites such as multi-layered and wire-reinforced materials. In this study, aluminum plates were explosively welded by placinga steel wire mesh between them in ordertoproduce wire mesh reinforced composite materials. The steel wire meshes were placed at two different orientations (458 and 908). The wire mesh was used to improve the mechanical properties of the explosively welded aluminum plates. Hardness, tensile strength, toughness, bending and microstruc-ture of the explosively welded composite materials were evaluated. The tensile and toughness tests results showed that the 458 wire mesh reinforced composites exhibited higher strength than unreinforced explosively bonded Al plates. No separation was observed in the interface of the welded composite materials after three-point bending. The highest hardness value was measured for the area near the joining interface.