Explosion Welding Application for U.S. Navy By C. Ray, K. Dietrich and J. Dupley, The Ohio State University Marine Mechanical Corporation (MMC) is seeking a drastic reduction of time required to produce proprietary components for their pending and future contracts with the United States Navy. The current procedure for joining a nodular iron wear-surface to and Inconel base metal requires 30 to 40 hours per unit. MMC would like to reduce the unit production time to approximately 10 hours. The explosion welding process was decided to be the most feasible way of accomplishing this task. Laboratory testing was used to evaluate the bond quality of the explosion cladding process. Testing included microstructure evaluation via optical microscopes, x-ray, ultrasonic scanning, visual inspection, micro-hardness and shear strength testing. All of the laboratory testing yielded favorable results for the explosion process using nodular iron as the clad material and Inconel as the base material. The test results indicate that explosion cladding is a viable alternative for the manual oxy-fuel process, meeting or exceeding all requirements, and would successfully reduce the production time to MMCıs target time of 10 hours per part. The procedure development started mid October 2000 and was finished mid May 2001.