Date of Award
Fall 2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Mechanical Engineering
First Advisor
Domblesky, Joseph
Second Advisor
Fournelle, Raymond
Third Advisor
Bowman, Anthony
Abstract
In the forging industry of today the need for United States based companies to reduce cost and maintain or improve the quality of a product has become essential in order to remain competitive. A company such as Green Bay Drop Forge (GBDF), a manufacturer of standard and custom steel forgings, was tasked with improving the forging process of one of their large hand tool products. A large wrench, forged at GBDF was noticed to contain a large amount of flash and excessive amount of hammer blows required to forge the part. The large amounts of flash and excessive hammer blows increased forging time and money spent on scrap material. Rather than spending significant time and money in trial and error on the shop floor, the use of Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Finite Element (FE) based softwares such as Unigraphics NX 8.5 and DEFORM were used to propose an optimized forging process. Validation of the process model was conducted through simulations of the existing forging process and comparisons with forged platters obtained from GBDF. Once validated, changes to the billet and impression geometries were proposed and simulated in DEFORM to predict forging results. Forging trials were performed on the shop floor and the results were compared to the DEFORM model predictions. The proposed changes helped to reduce the total number of blows in the forging process by 22% and the flash by 4% while improving metal flow in the preform operation and die fill in the forging dies.