Carbon fiber materials used in the aerospace industry contain predominately continuous carbon fiber (CCF). This inextensible fiber material is advantageous for manufacturing high performance aerospace grade components because of its superior mechanical properties. Unfortunately, when compared to automated metal fabrication or injection molding processes, high production costs plague the manufacturing of CCF composite components. Discontinuous Carbon Fiber (DCF) materials have been developed for production of structural composite components. DCF materials were able to form complex geometries due to enhanced fiber axis stretching, in-plane shear, and inter-ply shear. Use of DCF materials with low cost advanced forming technologies has increased but transition of formed products is limited to simple geometric shapes due to process limitations caused by the occurrence of deleterious deformations. A single diaphragm forming process was utilized to form pre-collated laminates of pre-impregnated DiscoTexTM into a sine wave spar for use in aerospace wing structures. Sine wave spars are opposite sign doubly curved geometries that are difficult to form. DiscoTexTM is a five harness satin woven DCF that was pre- impregnated with an out of autoclave resin system, Cytec Cycom 5320-1. The forming parameters manipulated were: diaphragm stiffness, forming temperature, forming time, stretch in the warp direction, stretch in the fill direction, laminate thickness, laminate size and lamina fiber orientation on component quality. The effect these parameters had on the developed in-plane shear strains were identified to determine the forming characteristics of the DCF material. In order of significance, the research results showed that forming temperature, forming time, laminate size and diaphragm stiffness had the greatest effect on in-plane shear strain. These research conclusions enable the manufacturing process of this material to produce quality composite components with the ability to identify forming parameters from the inception of the process. Advisors/Committee Members: Charles E Bakis, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor, Kevin L Koudela, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor.