As forgers are pressured to remain competitive, they must act on opportunities to reduce costs, eliminate scrap and improve operational efficiency.

In this final installment of our series “North American Forging is Advanced Manufacturing,” we will explore “above-the-shop-floor operations.”

Part 7 in our series on the North American forging industry focuses developing a skilled workforce.

This sixth article in our series on the North American forging industry focuses on process modeling, simulation and analysis.

The motivation of forgers to understand how design and process changes influence various aspects increases the need for versatile process-simulation tools capable of modeling the entire process chain.

Like any advanced manufacturing process or enterprise, process controls are critical in meeting the demanding customer requirements of forged products.

Grain flow is the orientation of grains and inclusions/particles within the metal caused by plastic deformation.

This article – the fourth in our series – concentrates on advanced raw materials, which add shape and value to materials ranging from specialty and microalloyed steels to metal-matrix composites.

In this second of two articles about design of experiments (DOE) and optimization, we illustrate how they apply to forging design.

In order to achieve the benefits that grain flow can impart to a forged component, there is a need to understand the end service of the component to produce a forging with the grain flow of the required orientation in the critical region(s) of the component.