Our rocket-propellant tank bottoms have achieved production: the manufacturing cycle has been reduced by more than 90 per cent, with the first ultra-low temperature formation technology.

According to news from IT House on 3 June, today, according to news reports, the high-performance and sophisticated formation team of the Faculty of Mechanical Sciences of Dalian University, based on the internationally pioneered “super-low-temperature formation technology”, successfully achieved the production of total propellant tanks with a diameter exceeding 2 metres, reducing the manufacturing cycle by more than 90 per cent and is expected to reduce the efficiency of high-frequency sub-launching in commercial space.

This metal component, which is more than 2 m in diameter and has a thickness of 4 mm, with a smooth outer surface and a “big pan cap”, is the bottom of a new rocket propellant tank that has just produced a line. Such a thin piece of material would have to stabilize and withstand the pressure of hundreds of tons of fuel at the time of launch of the rocket, as if it were difficult to hold a single paper over a high-pressure pan, which would be highly technical.

The IT House was informed that over the past few decades, the processing methods used in the industry have been either welded, unreliable or wasteful of materials and long processing cycles. With the first of the world's largest ultra-low temperature-forming equipment, the scientific team, in collaboration with domestic firms, has recently achieved the capacity to produce about 1,000 units of the total “lightboard” per year.

According to Van Xiaobo, a researcher at the Faculty of Mechanical Sciences of the Dalian Polytechnic University, metals are usually cold and harmful at very low temperatures. Team studies have found that aluminum alloys in a given state not only do not freeze at very low temperatures, but rather have a double-benefit effect of extending and hardening while increasing. Using this anomaly, the international first Aluminium Alloy super-low-temperature-forming technology has changed the traditional idea of heating at constant temperatures to super-low-temperature, so that thin plates can be used to form the whole box in a single-time fashion.

This process is imaged by the team as a “skin” and, at a very low temperature of about 160°C, aluminum alloys become like a “drained noodle” that can be stretched even more thinly and easily broken and wrinkled. At present, this new type of box has successfully flown with the Long March 12 and the Long March 7 A remote 14 carrier rocket.

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