Flowforming Offers Cost Savings for Titanium Components

Titanium alloys continue to be vital for many important defense and aerospace systems but high cost and long delivery times are major factors limiting titanium alloy usage.  Offering substantial economical benefits, flowforming is becoming more widely embraced as the manufacturing process of choice in the fabrication of difficult-to-produce thin wall, cylindrical components.  Flowforming is often used as a net-shape process, requiring less material to make a part and reducing the costs associated with secondary machining operations.  Advanced materials such as titanium alloys are often solely available in forged bar or billet and now can be successfully flowformed into precision tubular parts.  Seamless components with high length to diameter ratios, up to 50 to 1, realize the greatest cost savings through the flowforming manufacturing process.  To read the full article, click here.

Synopsis: We are facing the rising costs of materials. In the last 18 months alone, titanium and nickel prices have tripled. Making the problem worse, these materials are not readily available in tubular form. Therefore, when cylindrical components are needed in Titanium or Inconel more often than not, they are machined from solid bar with expensive operations and costly material wastes. By flowforming these expensive materials, customers keeps their components’ costs down in two significant ways. First, flowforming begins with a short preform, usually a fourth of the overall finished component’s length. Hence, there is minimal material waste when machining the short preform. Second, because the piece is flowformed to either net shape or near net shape, there is the elimination of costly machining operations that are conventionally employed to produce cylindrical components such as trepanning, gun drilling and boring. Design engineers, metallurgists, and procurement groups who are seeking ways to save metal and money are now turning to flowforming. Those who always appreciated the dimensional, mechanical, and metallurgical benefits of this manufacturing process are now strategically taking advantage of the economics of flowforming. Click here for entire article.

In this article, case studies on Inconel 718 show that flowforming improves the grain structure of the material. 

The plastic deformation of the flowforming process significantly increases the strength of Titanium 6Al-4V while still maintaining good tensile ductility. Case studies are explained in this article.