February 2022 Volume 4

FORGING RESEARCH

Expanding the Market for Forgings with Cast Preforms By Alexa Smith

Forgings provide enhanced properties, while the casting process allows for complex part geometry. Castings also provide the opportunity for purchasing specialty steel grades in smaller batches, offering compositions tailored to the application and allowing higher performance steels to be utilized at lower economical costs. In collaborationwith Advanced Technology International (ATI) under the Improved Forging Acquisition Manufacture and Materials (IFAMM) Program, the University of Alabama at Birmingham

(UAB) and Steel Founders’ Society of America (SFSA) have worked to combine the strengths of both processes by forging a cast part. The objective of the study was to reduce the segregation and micro- porosity found in castings, improving mechanical properties as a result of forging. Cast Preforms can expand the markets for both castings and forgings by incorporating the forging operation as a value-added operation. Locally forging in critical areas of the casting was shown to improve reliability and performance.

Figure 1: Yield strength vs max pore cluster size of low alloy high performance Q&T steel. Round data points are as-cast properties, and diamond data points are taken from forged samples.

FIA MAGAZINE | FEBRUARY 2022 68