May 2024 Volume 6

EQUIPMENT & TECHNOLOGY

LIFT and Accelerating Technology for Industry By John Keogh

As the saying goes, everything old is new again. We have seen it with fashion as trends come and go and come back again. We have seen it in the entertainment industry as movies from decades ago are remade and then remade again. However, we haven’t necessarily seen that trend in advanced manufacturing. Why? Is that because as researchers, scientists, product engineers, and manufacturing engineers we are always looking for what’s next or what’s the new, shiny object we can work on or tool we can work with? Whether it is automation, robotics, or additive manufacturing, we, as the U.S. industrial base, have tended to abandon what “has worked” for what “could work.” As a national advanced manufacturing innovation institute at LIFT, we would not advocate to avoid developing what “could work”, as innovation is core to our mission. The truth is, however, that we can and should combine the old with the new, and not just leave older materials and manufacturing processes, particularly castings and forgings, tossed aside gathering dust. Not only is there wisdom in those more mature materials and methods, but there is also comfort in what they can produce from industry, regulators, policymakers and, importantly, the end users. There have also been pressures from global competitors which we must take more and more seriously if the U.S. is to regain its posi tion as the global manufacturing leader. Over the last 40 years, the U.S. has seen a decrease in forging companies of more than 30% and more than 70% fewer ferrous and nonferrous foundries. Indeed, casting and forging in the U.S. has been largely commoditized by increasing raw material costs, increasing labor costs, and increasing energy costs… and of course a stricter regulatory landscape. The question is, how can we reenable, reregister, and reequip more traditional 20th century manufacturing methods with 21st century technologies to bring them into the present and help usher them into the future? This is particularly relevant as materials and manufac turing processes are changing daily, which offers us opportunities for transformational and incremental improvements, and position the U.S. organic industrial base at the forefront of future manufac turing and create future competitive advantage. That’s the role we are playing at LIFT, as the national advanced materials manufacturing innovation institute, where our approach is to think about using new, innovative techniques while still using traditional processes. We are working to reach back to methods which have worked for decades and figure out how we can augment those traditional manufacturing methods with some of the tenets of contemporary advanced manufacturing – such as robotics and

automation – to regain competitiveness in the world of casting and forgings and bring them forward into today. One of the keys to bringing forging into the future is virtual modeling and simulation, or more specifically, integrated computational mate rials engineering (ICME), which is one of our core expertise at LIFT. ICME is an iterative process that focuses on evaluation, simulation, prediction, and optimization of a material or manufacturing process in the virtual space, done by linking digital models across multiple domains and length scales, bringing the physical “make and break” cycle into the virtual space. By employing ICME, both the material and manufacturing process can be modeled and simulated in the digital space before anything is physically produced. Once the models are in place, physical articles can be produced to validate and calibrate those models, making them more accurate and effective. This approach minimizes much of the traditional “make and break” investment of old and accelerates the development process. What that means for the future of forging is the possibility to accel erate the adoption and use of novel technologies, such as open die numerical forging. When combined with ICME and robotics, open die numerical forging opens the landscape to a new set of opportunities and effi ciencies and helps to mitigate the significant challenge of workforce attrition the U.S. currently endures at casting and forging outfits. We often call this approach metamorphic manufacturing or robotic blacksmithing because it is what you might have traditionally seen in a blacksmith shop long ago, except with the robot operating as the blacksmith.

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