European Community research on forging of magnesium alloys (MagForge): state of affairs

While the interest in wrought magnesium applications is growing, forging of magnesium alloys in Europe and beyond is still restricted to a few specialized companies that operate for niche markets. Technical matters that relate to this are underdeveloped mechanical properties of available feedstock materials and lacking analytical capabilities on process design and product performance. A further issue concerns the unfamiliarity with the material throughout the forging sector and at the end users, so that the threshold for implementation is considerable. As a result, the size of scale is still small: magnesium accounts only for a minor share of the non-ferrous forging volume. It is, however, increasingly recognized by the forging industry that magnesium can be a worthwhile alternative for steel and aluminum. This is triggered by the need for weight saving for automotive applications – which is the sector’s main market – in order to improve on fuel efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions. Other favorable attributes of magnesium forgings are their strength and toughness (as compared to their cast counterparts), their near-to-net shaping capabilities, and their range of complementary geometries (as compared to other wrought products, notably sheets and extrusions). Starting from this baseline, a consortium of industrial associations, companies, research organizations and universities has initiated the European Community research project “Magnesium Forged Components for Structural Lightweight Transport Applications” (acronym: MAGFORGE). The overall goal of this so-called Collective Research project is to provide tailored and cost-effective technologies for the industrial manufacturing of magnesium forged components. Scientific and technological targets are new alloys/feedstock materials with improved performance, forging process modeling and design tools with a satisfying level of predictability, machining technology for safe and rational finishing, and typical demonstrator components to validate results. Further, dissemination and training activities are arranged to ensure that the results reach the different stakeholder categories. The consortium joins 23 participants from twelve countries (B, CZ, D, E, F, I, NL, PL, RO, S, SI, UK). Duration of the project is from July 2006 to December 2009, with a total manpower effort adding up to 27 person-years. The paper at hand addresses the various technological aspects of magnesium forging and its associated operations and exemplifies some of these with results from the MAGFORGE project. General background information on MAGFORGE is available from an earlier paper and from the project’s homepage. Further, specific project results on the distinct research areas are reported in a number of supplementary contributions in this proceedings volume