Forging
Forged Components
Trinity Industries provide customized and innovative forged parts to enhance the performance and durability of your vehicles. Forging is a process of shaping metal by applying high pressure and temperature using a hammer or a press. Forging can produce parts with high strength, durability, and resistance to wear and fatigue. Forging is widely used in the automotive industry, machinery parts, agricultural machinery, Pipe fittings, pump parts, hydraulic parts, etc.
Closed Die Forging
Closed Die Forging is a forging process in which dies move towards each other and cover the workpiece in whole or in part. The heated raw material, approximately the shape or size of the final forged part, is placed in the bottom die. The forging body is incorporated as a negative image in the top or bottom die. Coming from above, the impact of the top die on the raw material forms it into the required forged form.
Main steps involved in closed die steel forging processes are die/tool making, billet cutting, billet heating, forging, trimming, heat treatment, shot blasting, machining, surface treatment, inspection, and packaging.
Step 1: Die Design & Making
The first step of the closed-die forging manner is to create a mould. A mould allows us to forge the hot metallic into a precise shape which has been detailed by means of the client. We can create quite a number of parts out of a range of distinctive metals in a range of shapes and sizes.
Step 2: Material Selection & Pre-processing
Depending on what is needed from the part, many factors come into play. Metal can be forged into different strengths or different weights. Various materials and the grades in which are work are Stainless Steel, Carbon Steel, and Alloy Steel. Before forging the steel billet, it needs to be heated to a desired temperature. After heating, it is then transported to the forging machine using tongs. There remains less than a minute to respond to the heated metal before it cools down.
Step 3: Forging
After heating billets, heated steel bars will be placed under upper and lower dies, and then pressed into the desired shape, but redundant material will be shown around the product, which is named flash.
Step 4: Trimming
As the molds are made up of an upper die and lower die when forging, excess material will come out during the deformation process. To obtain net-shape forging blanks, such a flash needs to be removed. So, forgings with flash will be placed in simple trimming dies in the punching machine, and the punching operation will remove the flash directly.
Step 5: Shot Blasting
Steel forgings will be shot blasted to get rid of the scale and get a superior surface finish. After shot blasting, products will appear considerably more smooth and more transparent.
Step 6: Machining
Although though forging blanks have tighter tolerances than casting blanks, occasionally this is still insufficient for application; in these circumstances, machining is required. The NC lathe and CNC are the primary machining tools used in our business. While CNC is used for precise, expensive machining, NC lathes are utilized for simple machining.
Step 7: Heat Treatment
Heat treatment uses heating or cooling—typically to very high temperatures—to harden or soften materials in order to obtain the desired outcome. Annealing, case hardening, precipitation strengthening, tempering, carburizing, normalizing, and quenching are all heat treatment processes.
Step 8: Inspection
When determining if a product complies with requirements, numerous product qualities are measured, examined, tested, or gauged. The results are then compared to the requirements.
Forging process benefits
Forging has many benefits for making, such as:
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Improved mechanical properties: Forging can enhance the strength, hardness, ductility, fatigue resistance, and impact resistance of the metal by aligning its grain structure and eliminating defects.
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Reduced weight: Forging can produce parts with optimal shapes and sizes that reduce the weight of the vehicle and improve its fuel efficiency and performance.
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Lower cost: Forging can reduce the material wastage and machining costs by producing near-net-shape parts that require minimal finishing operations.
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Better quality: Forging can ensure consistent quality and reliability of the parts by eliminating porosity, cracks, voids, etc.