Exquisite Energy Savings at Cold Metal Forming of Threads through the Application of Polymers

Abstract

One of the global problems today is energy—its production and distribution. As the human population grows, the consumption of energy rises simultaneously. However, the natural sources are limited, and so the focus on power savings becomes more and more important. One of the ways to reduce consumption is the use of effective lubricants and tribological fluids in industry, especially in processes with high demands on energy but high quality of products as well. Forming is a typical example of such technology, and the application of polymers seems to be a very important challenge, because the application of straight oils or lubricant with extreme pressure additives seems to be prevailing in that field. Nevertheless, the polymer lubricant should fulfill all European standards as well as the environmental and ecological limitations with respect to health and the natural environment and its recycling and disposal. This paper is focused on the forming technology of threads and the application of selected polymers to the forming process. The measured and quantified criteria are torque and force loadings, energy consumption, and quality of the produced surfaces. Kistler dynamometers, scanning electron microscopy, and advanced surface topography with the use of Alicona IF-G5 were applied to assess all aspects of the tribological and energy aspects of six modern process fluids, three lubricating pastes, and two fluid modifications. The results show that the polymer synthetic lubricant (at volume concentration 20% in water) can reduce the total energy consumption by up to 40% per forming cycle (in mean values) at average surface roughness below 0.8 μm.