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Increasing Sustainability in Open-Die Forging by Means of Process Adaption and Innovation

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Abstract:

Climate change is progressing rapidly, posing severe risks to the environment and making sustainability and circularity key challenges for future industrial development. Greenhouse gas emissions are largely driven by human activities within industrialized societies, requiring adaptation at individual, societal, and industrial levels. Metal forming technologies can contribute significantly to this transformation by improving material efficiency, process efficiency, product efficiency, and circularity. Material efficiency is particularly important, as material production accounts for the largest share of industrial emissions. Process efficiency offers a high leverage effect, due to the large production volumes in forming process chains, while product efficiency reduces energy consumption during usage and enhances the performance of energy generation systems. Circularity supports sustainability by extending material lifecycles through reuse and recycling, thereby avoiding energy-intensive primary production. This paper presents an overview of exemplary sustainability contributions in metal forming process chains. For open-die forging, it can, for example, be shown, that digital twins, virtual reality–based operator training and real-time assistance systems are measures to improve material and process efficiency. A circularity approach for open-die forging is presented, with a remanufacturing concept for large shafts based on re-forging end-of-life components, in order to heal fatigue-related damage by forming. Increased material, process and product efficiency is demonstrated by a use case study of forging hollow rotor shafts for wind turbines. Whereas, the hollow-forging allows for weight reduction in the rotor component and thus enables higher power density of the generator, thinner tower designs and reduced logistic costs. Additionally, the use of an innovative air-hardening ductile (AHD) steel can eliminate the energy-intensive heat treatment in the process chain.

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Periodical:

Key Engineering Materials (Volume 1051)

Pages:

179-189

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4028/p-q7w6PK

Citation:

Cite this paper

Online since:

April 2026

Authors:

David Bailly*, Moritz Gouverneur, Junhe Lian

Keywords:

Circularity, Efficiency, Metal Forming, Open-Die Forging, Sustainability

Funder:

The publication of this article was funded by the RWTH Aachen University 10.13039/501100007210

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Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

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* - Corresponding Author

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