In the field of ship parts manufacturing, disc forgings, as key transmission components, have quality that directly affects the stability and safety of equipment operation. A ship parts factory in Taizhou, Zhejiang, has long focused on the production and processing of this type of forging, but faces issues such as large machining allowances, low material utilization, and difficulties in controlling product consistency in actual production. To overcome these bottlenecks, the factory cooperated with Jianing Forging to optimize forging processes and mold design solutions, thereby improving the quality of disc forgings.

Case Summary

This collaboration focuses on a certain specification of shipboard disc forging, which must meet high dimensional accuracy and internal tightness requirements. After receiving the request, the Jianing forging team conducted a systematic analysis of the original process, combining material properties and equipment capabilities to develop an improvement plan.

Customer pain points

Previously, the plant had the following prominent issues in disc forging production:

• Large surplus in forging blanks, long subsequent machining cycles, and severe material waste;
• Significant dimensional fluctuations within the same batch of products and unstable pass rates;
• Traditional open-die forging processes have low efficiency and struggle to meet delivery time requirements;
• Some forgings have internal looseness defects that affect operational reliability.

Product advantages and solutions

To address these pain points, Jianing Forging has implemented improvements from three dimensions: mold design, forging processes, and heat treatment parameters:

• Mold optimization: Using a closed die forging solution reduces flash loss, increases material utilization by over 15%, and helps forgings closer to finished products, reducing subsequent processing volume.
• Process control: Through a multi-step design of pre-forging + final forging, combined with more accurate billet weight calculations, product dimensional consistency is effectively controlled, with a batch pass rate increased to 98%.
• Heat Treatment Stabilization: Optimizes normalizing and tempering process parameters, eliminates forging stress, refines grain structure, and improves internal density and mechanical properties of forgings.
• Process efficiency: By shortening die change times and optimizing forging cycles, the production cycle for single pieces is about 20% shorter than traditional processes, meeting customer delivery requirements.

The final delivered disc forgings were inspected by the customer, and all indicators met design specifications, with overall manufacturing costs reduced by about 10% compared to before improvements, earning high customer recognition. This case demonstrates that Jianing Forging possesses mature process customization capabilities in the field of ship component forgings, which can address issues in precision, efficiency, and material utilization that exist in conventional production.