The global objective of the ViF - Co-ordination Action (ViF - CA) is to create a 'knowledge community' in forging production technologies through promotion and support of the networking, and enhancement of industrial, research and innovation activities. Forging and related metal forming processes are key and central operations in the life of a very wide range of products. Over the last decades, these industrial processes have been improved through a very large number of RTD projects in materials science, mechanical engineering and more recently in physics and numerical simulation. Today, to remain competitive, the industry has to incorporate all this knowledge and the recent advances in virtual production, supply chain and life-cycle management into their practices. Joint activities are clearly the best means to satisfy this urgent need for an optimised holistic production and design chain, and in the end, to reach rapid global manufacturing through the concept of virtual factory.
The activities of the project are designed to foster a European forging community, to develop the feeling of identity and a common way of thinking within a large multi-national consortium, to perform activities that tie the available research portfolio to the strategic needs of the community, to provide blueprints of the required research, and to transfer knowledge and technology from and to the different industrial sectors with common manufacturing and scientific problems.

Forging and related cold and hot metal forming processes such as extrusion, shape rolling involve plastically deforming a metal workpiece under great pressure (and often also at high temperatures) into parts called forgings. They are key industrial production technologies since they can create parts that are stronger than those manufactured by any other metalworking process. These processes themselves are controlled to impart particular characteristics, including structural integrity, impact strength, fracture toughness, fatigue life, and uniformity. This is why forgings, with their superior strength and durability, are almost always specified and required where reliability and human safety are critical. Because they can be economically produced from essentially any metal or alloy and in almost any size and shape, they also offer great design flexibility. Today, most parts are designed using simulation codes. Forging processes themselves are first virtually tested before actual implemetation in the plants.
Up to 1010 parts made of aluminium, steel, titanium, nickel or other alloys are forged or hot formed every year in nearly 1000 companies throughout the European Community for a turnover of more than 8000 M€. But forgings can rarely be seen, as they are normally component parts contained inside assembled items such as airplanes, automobiles, tractors, ships, oil drilling equipment, engines, missiles and all kinds of capital equipment - to name a few. Forged parts vary in size, shape and sophistication - from the hammer and wrench in a toolbox to close tolerance precision components in the Airbus A380 and Ariane V rocket. In fact, over 18,000 forgings are contained in one large aircraft. More than 250 forgings can be used in a single car. Some of the largest customer markets for such products include : automotive, aerospace, defence, agriculture, construction, mining, material handling, body implants and general industrial equipment. In fact, no car, plane or train with advanced designs could run without forged parts. Even the dies themselves that make forgings (and other metal and plastic parts) are forged.
Of course, most cold or hot metal forming operations have the same scientific bases and needs. Therefore the exchange between these different industrial sectors will be promoted in this project through the active collaboration of partners in various fields (industrial and academic partners) and through the topics to be covered in the activities.
According to a statement of the US Department of Energy and the American Forging Industry Association, ''in the year 2020, forging will be the cost-effective, preferred method by which metal components of superior quality, integrity, and performance are produced for critical applications''. To reach this goal, it is important to describe the current state-of-the-art and the high priority research needs for this industry.

The development and optimisation of metal forming processes require to combine knowledge and expertise in various scientific fields such as metallurgy and materials science, lubrication, heat transfer, heat treatment, mechanics of industrial devices, automation, tooling design, or large scale numerical modelling for virtual set-ups of the process sequences. Due to more and more stringent economic and ecological constraints, these technologies are now high tech areas in materials science, process control and virtual modelling.

Materials and Tooling

The ability to improve tooling and increase materials utilisation is hindered by technology barriers that exist in several aspects of the forging process such as material property understanding, measurement and testing, die making, die materials, tribology and lubrication. Some barriers associated with measurement and testing, process control, and process modeling may be closely related. Indeed, the current state-of-the-art for the efficient development of tool design and new forming industrial processes does not only rely on the craft knowledge of good process engineers combined with costly and time consuming full scale trial-and-error experiments, but also more and more on rapid 2D and 3D numerical simulations. Indeed 2D and 3D numerical models are now available, widely commercialised and used in the metal forming industry. Computer platforms are powerful enough to run full 3D simulations during the design stages of new processes with a high level of numerical accuracy. However the quality of such numerical simulations is still limited by the quality of the available input data for the material (mechanical behaviour or metallurgical models) and the tool/interface parameters friction and heat transfer). The process engineer usually uses data found in Handbooks or in poorly documented material databases. These data are typically determined from laboratory tests. The lack of data is maybe even greater for describing the tool/workpiece interface since information is needed for that specific couple of materials and for similar surface quality of the workpiece and tools.
This project will deal with this need for reference methods to obtain quickly reproducible and reliable material data. It is important to compare mechanical testing procedures for identifying such parameters. Yet few standards have been developed to ensure the reliability of the testing procedures and the identification of material parameters. The first RTD works performed for instance by partnership in Britain, Germany or France through national programs have revealed the need for further research in these fields at the European level and among the forging and metallurgy communities. Indeed good practice guides and industrial software packages allowing for accurate analysis of tests should be designed and distributed throughout Europe in European projects and networks. Several IMS projects are running also on these thematics in metallurgy, and their results could be shared within the parternship. Proprerty rights issues can be important since the material data can be considered either as confidential or as part of the promotion of a product/material grade. There is also in that respect an urgent need for exchange of information, for instance through internet website links. In a word, there is a significant need for material property understanding and accurate material database to drive simulations.

Environment and Energy

The forging industry of the future has to be energy-efficient and to protect the environment. A forging plant should be a zero environmental liability, making it a valued and responsible neighbour in its community. To accomplish this, the forging industry must consider ways it can substantially reduce its energy intensity by developing and applying advanced technology. Of course, such goals are part of the overall objectives of process optimisation and process development. A question should be raised however on the possibility of achieving environmental goals at the expense of the energy goals if some technologies that improve environmental performance require higher energy use. One must examine the industry's current environmental performance and determine how emissions can be reduced using improved technology and practices. There is a general lack of knowledge about how energy use is distributed among the various process steps used in a forging plant. The electrical losses associated with forging equipment and poorly insulated heating devices contribute significantly to reduced energy efficiency. There are also problems in adapting technologies from other industries to the forging industry because of differences in the operating environments.
Working conditions can also be an issue. They are related to scientific and technological barriers. For instance, goals in some forge shops are to reduce the ambient noise to below 95 dB, which means using noise control technologies.
Often, the goal to recycle all fluids should be expanded to include other by-products of the forging process, that is to say to eliminate wasteful and harmful by-products. For instance the results of several national and European projects dealing with lubricant-free and ''green'' lubricants in metal forming operations (forging, stamping) and coating should be shared more widely in the community.

Quality and Productivity

Forgings are high added value products, very often critical parts in an assembly. The forgers must be able to handle small or large orders while maintaining parts-per-million quality levels at low selling prices. This is why today's product development is shifting from sequential work to simultaneous engineering based on the extensive use of numerical simulations. 2D and 3D numerical models are now used in industry to optimise metal forming processes such as forging, rolling, stamping or extrusion. The computer platforms are powerful enough to use codes such as finite element models with very fine meshes, thus allowing to reach a very high level of numerical accuracy. But the scientific approaches may vary and should be compared, for instance through reference benchmarks of forming simulations.
The quality and usefulness of such modelling operations is mostly limited by the fact that upstream and downstream requirements for the product are not taken into account. Therefore, there is a need not only for virtual manufacturing but also for a virtual integrated product and process design, that is to say for an integration of the process simulations into global simulation chains of the life cycle of the material (forming steps, potential heat treatments, in-use analysis…). It is important to mention that such an integration will also require specific training of personnel to understand the different requirements all along the supply chain.

The scientific and technological missions of the Co-ordination Action are to :

- identify and assess the scattered current knowledge and expertise needed for the technologies of metal forming (materials science, materials database, industrial equipment, numerical models and software)

- identify the industrial and scientific needs, and provide a blueprint of the required research

- include forging and metal forming processes within the whole life of a part

- define and validate benchmarks in mechanical testing, friction, heat transfer, numerical modelling and software

- create an e-Forging environment for the forging community

- define educational programmes and promote them in academic institutions

- set and define ways to meet technological, environmental and ecological requirements

In order to assess the performance of the project, joint and common activities have been defined and organised to produce measurable and verifiable deliverables such as workshops/conferences, reports with past and on-going projects analysis, exchange of personnel between universities and between industry and academic institutions, roadmap for sharing and improving the access of information through good practice guides or database, development of internet sites and portals, development and combinations of advanced and transversal educational tools and programmes, the full integration of the supply-chain through a chain of sequential process virtual simulations, and pro-active synergies with many other on-going programmes (national projects, Networks of Excellence, STREP, IP, Eureka, ESF, IMS…).