The forging industry already relies on a wide spectrum of competence and skills. The trend is to go into more integrated activities for simultaneous engineering and competitive approaches. This requires to combine even wider ranges of knowledge and expertise.
Industrial partners have been very interested in joining the project and have demonstrated a great involvement in the definition of the objectives and of the tasks of VIF-CA. There is a clear need in this community for achieving the goals of the co-ordinated activities and an obvious will to share information and strategies to solve problems. VIF-CA is to be opened to all forging actors, but in order to meet the objectives of the project, the consortium was restricted to partners who will really perform specific tasks. The dissemination strategies planned in the project will then allow for an optimal and efficient use of the project results.
The European world of forging is fragmented both in terms geographic locations and in terms of knowledge and expertise (academia, large and small industries). The consortium of VIF-CA gathers 49 partners with specific and complementary expertise, approaches and interests in order to span all the topics of the project :
- Industrialists in metal forming
- Experts in the development of numerical models for forming operations
- Experts in metallurgy, materials, friction and heat transfer testing
- Software and IT companies
- Teaching and research institutions
The world of forging is by nature based on industrial activities. To-morrow's forging will be a mix of actual and virtual activities, therefore the consortium has to gather forging plants, together with support, consultant and software companies. This is reflected in the present consortium :
- 20 of the 49 partners belong to the industrial sectors : 10 partners are performing forging and metal forming, 6 partners are software, IT or consultant companies, 4 partners are industrial support and dissemination centers. It is important to note that all industrial partners will be fully involved in the joint activities, whether these activities are meant to define industrial needs, to share knowledge, to perform benchmarking exercise, or to develop software.
The consortium includes 14 SME's. This a representative sample of the large number of the SME's dealing with forging and asking for advanced knowledge and practices. Several industrial support research centers will also be able to interact with many other SME's outside the consortium.
- 29 of the 49 partners are research and teaching institutions with direct involvement in the various scientific areas needed : numerical modelling, materials science, metallurgy, mechanics and information technology.
Industrial research centers, SMEs central dissemination organisations, professional associations of the European countries with the largest forging and metal forming communities (Germany, Italy, France, UK, Sweden and Spain) as well as EUROFORGE members are also in the consortium.
In order to create a feeling of common identity in the European forging community, the consortium spans 17 countries, many new member states, and associate members of the European Research Area.
The appropriate skills, expertise and equipment to perform the tasks as planned are clearly gathered in the consortium. Each partner's skills correspond to the topic of the tasks he/she is involved in. For instance, partners with IT and software expertise are acting in the workpackage on e-Forging. Industrial and research partners with metal forming software (resp. testing equipment) are involved in the benchmark definition, validation and exercise on numerical modelling (resp. materials testing). Teaching institutions as well as several professional and industrial research centers are involved in the education and training workpackages. A very large number of industrial partners are taking part to workpackage WP1 on the identification of the needs, the scope and the implementation of validated and novel solutions for today's forging and metal forming industry.

To achieve its goals, VIF-CA requires efficient and objective driven workpackage leadership and global CA management. Indeed, workpackage leaders will play a very important role in the success of the project. They have been selected because they are experts in the type of activities of the different workpackages, and because they are internationally renowned in their respective areas, and have demonstrated management skills in several previous projects.
Eight partners will perform the management activities i.e. the management of the Co-ordination Action and the workpackages leadership.

ARMINES-CEMEF (Centre for Materials Processing) is a Joint Research Unit in which two different legal entities are involved ARMINES and ENSMP-Ecole des Mines de Paris. It is associated with CNRS, the French National Science Foundation (UMR 7635). CEMEF is a strong research centre devoted to the physics and mechanics of materials processing. Approximately 130 people (50 PhD students) apply the science to materials processing. CEMEF's mission is threefold : i) transmission of the knowledge and of the know-how of CEMEF to engineers or researchers during their training at the Centre, ii) applied research and iii) active collaboration with Industry. One of the main CEMEF's activities started in 1980 with the creation of finite element software devoted to materials forming, industrialised and commercialised by TRANSVALOR: Forge2® (for 2D axisymmetric parts) and Forge3® (for complex 3D parts) are software being used in more than 50 companies in Europe and are commercial success. CEMEF is one of the world leaders in the development of Finite Element Software for metal and polymer processing modelling. CEMEF has been involved simultaneously in 10 running European projects at any time since 1995. Up to now CEMEF has taken part to nearly 40 European projects (R&D projects, networks, Marie Curie fellowships...), and has been the co-ordinator of one third of these projects. CEMEF is also co-ordinating a number of national projects such as project SimulForge gathering more than 15 French forging industries and research laboratories.

Interest and expectation: ARMINES-CEMEF has been a very active actor of the research and development activities on forging in France through major National large scale projects on metal and other materials forming processes. It has also co-ordinated several European projects on various topics related to materials forming and has set as a goal to co-ordinate activities for the whole spectrum of areas of interest which are needed in the forging and metal forming industry.

Representative: Professor Jean-Loup CHENOT, Head of the Laboratory and founder of ESAFORM, the European Scientific Association for Material FORMing created in 1997 to encourage high education and research in the field of material forming.

IVF assists companies to accelerate their growth and development through customised projects, group R&D projects and networking with other companies via a number of dedicated networks. IVF's strength lies in its ability to combine expertise with width and depth in a range of working areas. IVF has a staff of about 150 people working in a range of production areas, environment, IT and organisation. IVF distributes its knowledge of newly developed technology and the results of leading-edge research through newsletters and networks embracing the major sectors of the engineering industry. It is closely connected to the metal forming industry and organises its R&D efforts depending on industrial needs.

Interest and expectation: The forging industry in Europe is dominated and stressed by its main role as a supplier to the automotive industry and its Tier 1 suppliers. This means that there is a very strong competition between the majority of forging companies and little room for exchange and cooperation neither on a national not an international basis. This situation is amplified by an increasing competition from substitutes, such as casting and sheet metal working. The only true European forging association, EUROFORGE, is mainly dealing with managerial matters, for natural reasons as it is based on the national forging trade associations, It is today very weak as regards technical and educational matters, for example. This project, with its very wide participation from both educational and research institutions and industry, is in fact the first and most comprehensive and impressive attempt to gather all knowledge of forging in Europe with the intention to strengthen the competitiveness of its industry.
VIF-CA has a very strong participation from the academic society where the main task is education. Research projects there must, normally, have a focus on very narrow subjects and the industrial context and applicability is not always clear. WP1 is intended to give a wider industrial and societal perspective on forging and its role in society. The results will be important in bringing organisations with mutual interest together to form stronger teams and to avoid duplication of work and to identify industrials needs.
IVF and its representative have been involved in industrial forging research since 1970, always in close cooperation with the Swedish industry and also EUROFORGE. They have had few contacts with the academic world and little co-coperation, on project basis, with European R&D. This project will bring R&D institutions and industrial partners in Europe closer one to another and help in setting up suitable consortia for common R&D projects within FP6 and other programmes.

Representative: Mr. Jan Bodin, research leader in forging and heat treatment. Current secretary of the technical committee (ETC) of the Forging Association EUROFORGE.

SCC is a SME consulting company founded in 1989, whose main activities are based on :
- Integration of research software in the industry, which covers development, training and quality insurance,
- Consulting on manufacturing issues,
- Physical and mechanical Material Data
- Commercialisation and dissemination of metal simulation software
SCC is the co-ordinator of the on-going IMS project ''VHT Virtual heat treatment tool for monitoring and optimising HT process'' with Japan, Korea and the US.

Interest and expectation: SCC has been involved in the definition, implementation and development of specific database for material characteristics which are needed for numerical simulations of metal forming. SCC has industrialised several analysis tools for obtaining material data from complex mechanical tests and now wishes to work on the dissemination of such methodologies, on the identification and the characterisation of the missing data as leader of the work package 2.

Representative: Dr Chantal David, SCC manager with 15 years experience in numerical simulation, including 3D finite element methods for materials forming.

DIMEG/University of Padova (Dipartimento di Innovazione Meccanica e Gestionale), Italy, is active in research and education on production management, manufacturing processes and automation. It is mainly active in the following research areas : i) Rheology and workability in hot, warm and cold deformation conditions of steel, Aluminium, Ti and Ni based alloys: development of new constitutive equations and testing procedures ii) Integration of physical and finite element modelling in analysing bulk metal forming, iii) Thermal and mechanical fatigue and wear of tools for hot forming, iv) Heat transfer and thermal phenomena at workpiece tool interface in hot and warm forming, v) Computer aided design of cold and warm forming process. DIMEG has large experience of participation and coordination of European (Brite, Brite-Euram, 5th FP Growth, Eureka-Famos, Eureka-Factory,…) and national (PRIN) research projects in the technological domain of forging and extrusion. In the framework of these projects, DIMEG actively cooperates with technology industrial suppliers (press and tooling manufacturers,…) and forging industries in Italy and Europe. DIMEG also actively cooperates with UNISA (the Italian Association of Forging Industry) in continuous-education programmes for industry.

Interest and expectation: The VIF Co-ordination Action perfectly meets the educational and research mission of DIMEG laboratory. Major expectation from the project is the definition of new strategies and initiatives for more effective exposure and participation of SME's in the forging research and knowledge community.
The final goal of the overall project is to create a knowledge community in forging production technologies and one of its major tasks is that of incorporating into industrial practices the recent advances in virtual production. Thanks to its activities that are precisely aimed at defining, validating and promoting the use of reference benchmarks for virtual process simulations and material testing, WP3 is the key to create the engineering knowledge and the good practice methods for evaluation, calibration, implementation and effective use of virtual environments for process design and conduction.

Representative: Professor Paolo BARIANI, head of DIMEG

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CIMNE International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering - Leader WP 4

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The International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) was created in March 1987 as a consortium between the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). CIMNE has developed a Virtual Learning Centre devoted to teach advanced engineering topics via Internet. CIMNE employs currently some 150 scientists and engineers from different technical fields and nationalities (over 15 different countries), working in the development and application of numerical methods to a wide class of engineering problems (non linear analysis and safety studies of structures, shape optimisation, computational fluid dynamics studies, numerical simulation of material deformation and forming processes for the manufacturing industry). In the last fifteen year, CIMNE has taken part in more than 490 R&D European and Spanish projects. The outcome of the research is recorded in books, reports and software published by CIMNE (over 700 scientific publications and educational software codes). CIMNE has also successfully organised some 270 courses and seminars and 43 international conferences, in the field of numerical methods and their applications in engineering. CIMNE is the Secretariat of IACM (International Association for Computational Mechanics) and ECCOMAS (European Community in Computational Methods in Applied Sciences).

Interest and expectation: The forging sector is an advanced one from the industrial and mechanical points of view thanks to the development of important RTD projects in the last years. However, it lacks of a common platform that gathers all the recent knowledge produced and which makes it available to the European community. We see VIF-CA as the instrument to gather and disseminate knowledge. VIF-CA will allow the European forging sector to improve its competitiveness, incorporate best practices and contribute to the transformation of the forging sector into a knowledge-based one. CIMNE will lead WP4 (e-Forging) and will contribute to the above objectives by putting training and education topics at the reach of the forging community. CIMNE has large experience in the development of learning platforms and in designing multimedia tools for the management of e-contents via Internet .
The interest of CIMNE in the VIF-CA focuses on the possibility to access new data for calibration and validation of forging simulation codes developed at CIMNE, as well as to new advances in the mathematical formulation, numerical methods and constitutive models for the new generation of codes helping the optimal design of forging processes. In addition, CIMNE has a special interest in the development and application of innovative e-learning methods and multimedia tools for continuous education and training of the forging community in Europe.

Representative: Professor Eugenio ONATE, Director

The Institute of Metal Forming and Metal Forming Machine Tools (IFUM-Institut für Umformtechnik und Umformmaschinen) at the University of Hanover, is developing innovative solutions in the whole field of forming technology. With its 50 scientific assistants organised in five departments (Sheet Metal Forming, Forging, Metal Forming Machines, CA-Techniques and Numerical Methods), the institute covers fundamental research as well as applied research. Another field of expertise is the development of E-learning systems in the area of metal forming processes. IFUM has gained management experience through several EU-funded research projects and co-ordination of a cluster in the EU-funded network "ForgeNet".

Interest and expectation: The Institute of Metal Forming and Metal Forming Machine Tools (IFUM) at the University of Hanover, directed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. E. Doege, is developing innovative solutions in the whole field of forming technology. The activities contain fundamental research as well as applied research in co-operation with industrial partners.
An important aspect of the institute's activities is the University teaching position. The teaching programme contains special education methods in the area of forming technology and in related fields of production technology. It includes lectures, practise, laboratories, classes and excursions. Based on the wide experience in teaching methods the IFUM is able to contribute to the objectives of the workpackage "Teaching Forging Excellence" in the leading position. The IFUM is highly interested in the exchange of these experiences with other project partners to improve the ways of education in the field of forming technology.

Representative: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Eckart DOEGE, Director

The department of computational methods in metallurgy belongs to the faculty of metallurgy and materials science of the Akademia Gorniczo-Hutniza in Krakow, Poland. The scientific topics studied by the researchers include controlled laboratory tests, physical and numerical modelling of metal forming and advanced numerical techniques.

Interest and expectation: WP6 is designed so as to be properly correlated with the project : it will help identify the existing knowledge and the needs for further work in the different areas of metal forming (education, material data, numerical simulation tools, etc.). Extensive co-operation and relationships with other tasks are needed and are planned.

Representative: Professor Maciej PIETRZYK, head of the department, conference chair and organiser of the Metal Forming Conferences and of the 2002 ESAFORM conference.

The University of Bath previously coordinated an EC Thematic Network of "The use of Modelling Tools in the Forging Industry" and also a UK Network on "Forging Technology". The main domains of expertise are i) approximate methods for forging modelling, ii) Preform design for forging by reverse modelling, iii) Modelling of friction and heat transfer at the tool/workpiece interface, iv) Numerically controlled forming processes, v) Differential heating techniques and vi) Experimental techniques for contact condition measurement in forging.

Interest and expectation: The VIF Coordinated Action has the potential to enhance the collaborations within the EC. The new EC members should provide an additional dimension that we could not enjoy during the execution of the earlier FORGENET Thematic network. The most important task for success is to get the commitment of the partners to share their knowledge with others. WP7 will require extensive interaction mainly with WPs 1, 4, 5 and 6. Based on experience with the earlier FORGENET Thematic network, it is clear that this will require to obtain commitments for exchanges. This may mean that a personalised approach will be necessary involving visits.

Representative: Professor BRAMLEY