May 2025 Volume 7

FOUNDATION NEWS

LETTER FROM THE TECHNICAL COMMITTEE CHAIR Update and Request for Input on Materials By Jim Miller

O ver the past 26 years, it has many of you in the industry. For those who do not know me, I am Jim Miller, the Director of Sales and Marketing at Scientific Forming Technologies Corporation (SFTC) and now serve as been my pleasure working with, speaking to and supporting

To aid professors and students in developing grant proposals attractive to a wide range of FIA members, the committee suggested providing schools with a list of materials that are of common interest to the forging industry. The feedback from the committee is that some submitters, as they prepare their grant submissions, ask for direction on which materials to study. The Technical Committee has decided to develop a list of suggested materials can be published to the FIERF website and shared in subsequent calls for papers. We gladly welcome any input from our industry members as well. If you have specific materials that your organization would like to see more research on, then please contact FIA’s Technical Director, Dekland Barnum at dekland@ forging.org.

the Technical Committee Chair. With degrees in mechanical engineering and an earlier role at Alcoa, I have spent my career applying finite-element simulation technology to forging. I have also volunteered in numerous FIA, FIERF and ASM activities. My participation on the Technical Committee began when Karen Lewis extended an opportunity to join in 2018. During my time on the committee, I have strived to actively contribute to FIERF in the dedicated way that my mentor, John Walters (Vice President at SFTC), had done so. I was honored and humbled to have been recommended to the chair position by the outgoing Technical Committee Chair, Graham McIntosh (Executive Vice President and CTO at Universal Stainless). It is important to learn from good mentors, so it goes without saying that I will continue leadership of the Technical Committee in the example that Graham has set. Graham has been a strong supporter of FIERF and the Technical Committee, having served ten years on the Technical Committee and five years on the FIERF Board of Trustees. The committee members and I thank Graham for his leadership and longstanding guidance of the committee. In continuing where Graham left off, as the incoming Technical Committee Chair, I will work to support advancement of new technologies at forging member companies and educational opportunities for the next generation of forgers. Based on recommendations from the Technical Committee, the FIERF Board of Trustees approved the following four research projects for FIERF funding this year. 1. Cleveland State University: Investigation of Anti-Scale High Temperature Coatings for Forging Steel Alloys 2. Michigan Technological University: Model and Experience Based Method to Evaluate Heat Check Resistance in Open-Die Tooling 3. University of Florida: The Role of Induction Heating in Microstructure Evolution 4. University of North Texas: Micro-scale Forging Machine to Assess AM Die Coatings for Die Repair

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