It can be used on materials for which a press setup would be prohibitively large or require an unreasonably high pressure, and is generally much cheaper than building a large enough and sufficiently high-pressure press; on the other hand, it is unavoidably an individual job production process, producing one product at a time and with a long setup time.
The first commercial industrial application of explosive forming in the United States began in 1950 and was used into the 1970s by The Moore Company in Marceline, Missouri.
Purpose was to form proprietary shaped metal cylinders for use as the central structure of industrial axial vane fans.
In the late 1950s, the General Electric company developed an application for five-layer sheet metal composites that had been created using the explosive forming process.
GE engineers used this innovative composite material to produce multi-layer vacuum tube anodes (aka "plates") with superior heat transfer characteristics.
Moe, then Manager of Engineering at G.E,'s Owensboro Kentucky facility,[4] these increases were made possible by the application of the improved multi-layer plate material.
The explosively formed dissimilar materials had substantially improved evenness of heat transfer thanks to the copper center layer.
GE engineers quickly saw the potential for improved heat transfer characteristics in several already popular pentode and beam tetrode vacuum tube designs, including the 6L6GB, the 7189, and eventually the 6550.