Forming Space-Age Giant Components

A program was conducted to develop stretch-formed corrugated panels made of Rene 41 for the skin of hot areas in the booster nose section of the space shuttle. The temperatures reach 1600 F there, and this superalloy was necessary. The material is difficult to form, however, and techniques had to be developed for tooling and formation of the panels. This paper discusses those techniques, as well as those used to age-form thick aluminum panels for cryogenic fuel tanks. In addition explosive-forming and bulge-forming at Convair is described.