New lubricant systems for cold and warm forging – advantages and limitations

The increasing focus on environmental issues and the requirements to establish solutions diminishing the impact on working environment as well as external environment has strongly motivated the efforts to develop new, environmentally friendly tribological systems for metal forming production. The present paper gives an overview of these efforts substituting environmentally hazardous lubricants in cold, warm and hot forging by new, more harmless lubricants.

Introduction of these new lubricants, however, has some drawbacks due to lower limits of lubrication leading to risk of pick-up, poor product quality and tool wear.