FORGE® NxT FOR THE ENERGY INDUSTRY
With the ever-increasing global energy demand as well as the green revolution, the focus has been extended to open die forging processes. Transvalor stays ahead by offering unique competitive features to its forging solution in order to meet the challenges of the nuclear, petroleum and wind mill industry in terms of quality, time to market and cost savings.
"In 2009 Buderus Edelstahl GmbH started with the introduction of FORGE® simulation tool and new measurement technology in the open die forging shop. The reasons for choosing a 32-core FORGE® license have been:
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A highly stable and fast Finite Element solver
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An advanced technology for HPC calculation
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A multifunctional and user friendly pre- and postprocessor
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The high quality of results
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The possibility of building an interface to our LaCam Forge II measurement system which is installed at the 80/100MN-Press
After three years of experience with FORGE®, the simulation is an integral part of our production technology:
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Analyzing and improving existing forging strategies, just-in-time quality control and just-in-time production planning thanks to the high computational capacity,
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Savings when developing new products and materials thanks to the high accuracy of the results."
Andreas Tewes
Buderus Edelstahl GmbH
Wetzlar, Germany
Realistic kinematics
For open die forging processes like cogging, becking, mandrel drawing, the numerous part movements can easily be defined and validated, reheat can be predicted and equipment dimensioning can be set. With FORGE® NxT, all the movements of the part imposed by the manipulators, displacements and rotations, can easily be setup thanks to a Multi Pass File, and the simulation of all the blows is handled in a unique launch.
For ring rolling processes, refined piloting reflecting the actual ring rolling mill ensures accurate simulation. Movements of the cones can be taken into account as well as centering rolls.
Heat treatments
With embedded heat treatment capacity, FORGE® NxT allows to simulate the complete process workflow up to quenching in order to predict the hardness, the metallurgic changes, the distortions, residual stresses. Various quenching conditions can be reflected:
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Non homogeneous HTC,
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Descent into the bath,
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Spray quenching
Quenching model support both TTT and CCT curves.
Simulation of the entire quenching process of a standard steel shell, including descent into the bath.
Temperature distribution is represented in the cross section.
Optimal CPU time
One of the incremental forging simulation challenges is the computation time. To address this issue, FORGE® NxT 1.0 brings a state-of-the-art numerical technique that drastically reduces computation time while increasing results accuracy. Known as a bi-mesh method, it relies on the automatic split between 2 meshes: one fine mesh for the thermal calculation and history variables storage and one adapted mesh for the mechanical computation to finely capture localized deformations. This method is fully parallel and can thus be combined with HPC calculation providing an optimal speed-up.
Average grain size prediction (ASTM) in the cross section and on the surface at 50% of the cogging
operation of a standard steel 76t ingot. This computation was run with the bi-mesh technique,
allowing the use of a very fine mesh, 400 000 FE elements, for accurate grain size analysis.
This illustration shows the grain size prediction during the cogging operation of a 76t low alloy steel ingot. The cogging operation is made of 23 passes. Microstructure prediction requires a very fine mesh in order to capture accurately the grain size gradients. Such computation on a huge number of FE nodes can be achieved thanks to the bi-mesh method. In this case, the mesh is made of 400 000 elements and the CPU time is less than one day - 2 times faster - on a 12 core recent cluster.
From casting to forging, a unique competitive advantage
TRANSVALOR is the unique software editor in the field of forming process simulation to ensure the complete workflow, from casting to forging. This is achieved thanks to a coupling between the 2 TRANSVALOR’s codes, THERCAST® and FORGE® which share the same architecture and data management. With such coupling, results at the end of casting process can be tracked during the subsequent forging operations:
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Porosity: closing prediction during forging is done from distribution at the end of solidification
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Segregations and chemical element: areas with enriched carbon concentration or with carbon depletion can be tracked up to the end of forging.
Porosities tracking during mandrel drawing of a shell produced from a 140t ingot.
The blue surface is the boundary of the area where porosities may be encountered.
This surface has been initialized from THERCAST® results.
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