An explosive bonding procedure for joining 9.5 mm thick niobium plate to 203 mm thick 6061-T651 Al plate has been developed in order to maximize the bond tensile and impact strengths and the amount of bonded material across the surface of the plate. This procedure improves upon previous efforts, in which the 9.5 mm thick niobium plate is bonded directly to 6061-T4 Al plate. In this improved procedure, thin Nb and Al interlayers are explosively clad between the thicker niobium and aluminum plates. Bonds produced using these optimized parameters display a tensile strength of approximately 255 MPa and an impact strength per unit area of approximately 0.148 J/mm{sup 2}. Specialized mechanical testing geometries and procedures are required to measure these bond properties because of the unique bond geometry. In order to ensure that differences in the thermal expansion coefficients of aluminum and niobium do not adversely affect the bond strength, the effects of thermal cycling at temperatures between -22 C and 45 C on the mechanical properties of these bonds have also been investigated by testing samples in both the as-received and thermal cycled conditions. Based on the results obtained from this series of mechanical tests, thermal cycling is shown to have no adverse effect on the resulting tensile and impact strengths of the bonds produced using the optimized bonding parameters
