Our customer in the forging industry is a high-tech engineering company that provides products and parts, primarily for the manufacture of aeroengines. It supplies special metals and metal components for the production of commercial and military aircraft and helicopters.
During production the quality of the forging is highly dependent on the temperature of the metal and the temperature of the forging dies. Consequently, between each forging, the dies are removed from the forging press and placed in a pre-heat oven where the temperature can be precisely controlled with either heating or cooling applied to ensure the correct temperature before the dies are returned to the press for the next forging.
The variation in the hight and weight of the different forging die sets leads to a variation in the time required to heat or cool each set, this causes increased inefficiency in the overall process, with energy being wasted while hot metal is held waiting for the forging dies to come to the correct temperature for the next forging.
Working in conjunction with our client and other specialist suppliers we developed an electro-mechanical die separation control system whereby the serial number of the die set could be read from a bar-code; the oven then automatically separated the dies by a precise amount to allow heating or cooling elements to be inserted between each half of the die set. The precise separation meant that the space between the open dies could be tightly controlled, to greatly improve the efficiency of the heating or cooling so reducing the time in the oven.
If you have a bespoke engineering problem, our skilled designers and engineers would like to help provide a precision engineering solution. Please get in touch on 01924 259999.
