Lap
A fold of metal pressed onto the surface without fusing, usually at a flash land or fillet. A surface defect that becomes a crack initiation site under fatigue load.
Resources
The vocabulary of the forge, and what a pilot needs.
A glossary of the defects and process terms Forgiron's agents work with, the standards the reasoning layer cites, and the inputs a forge brings to a pilot baseline. No white papers or calculators are published yet; this page is the reference we actually have.
Standards the reasoning layer cites
- AS9100: aerospace quality management
- IATF 16949: automotive quality management
- NADCAP: special-process accreditation, including heat treating and NDT
- ASTM: material and test standards for forgings
- Your heating and press recipes, die and forging specs and quality procedures
Retrieval is tenant-isolated and every answer carries its citation. Citing a standard is not a certification claim.
Glossary
Twelve terms
The defects and process terms that appear throughout the site.
Fold
Metal doubled over on itself during the stroke from a mis-timed or under-energised blow. Caught by vision and MPI; predicted from heat and stroke state.
Underfill
A cavity the metal did not reach. Follows a cold billet, a worn die or too little blow energy, and shows as a dimensional fault.
Cold shut
A surface discontinuity where two metal fronts met without fusing, often from a billet heated unevenly or too cold at the surface.
Decarburization
Loss of carbon from the steel surface during heating, softening the skin. A heating error that degrades fatigue strength and hardness.
Grain flow
The fibre direction of the metal after forging. Aligned with the part's load path it gives forgings their fatigue strength; the mark on this site draws it.
Die fill
How completely the metal reaches every cavity of the die. Forgeon predicts it before the stroke and confirms it from force curves and vision.
Heat-checking
A network of fine thermal-fatigue cracks on a die surface from repeated heating and cooling. Diesmith tracks its growth per cavity.
Flash
The excess metal squeezed out between die halves, trimmed after forging. The flash land is where laps most often form.
Soak
Time held at temperature so the billet core catches up with the surface. Too short seeds underfill; too long burns energy and grows scale.
MPI
Magnetic particle inspection. Reveals surface and near-surface cracks in ferrous forgings. One of the five modalities Flawnex fuses.
Genealogy
The record of a forging: billet lot, heat curve, stroke record, die cycles, inspection results, approvals, heat-treat record and disposition.
Pilot baseline
What a forge brings to the first meeting
The inputs for a baseline agreed in writing.
About the cell
- Cell type, the part families it runs and their qualification status
- Heating, press, die, inspection, robot and heat-treat systems installed, with interfaces
- MES or quality system and how lots are recorded
- Shift pattern and who approves process changes
About the losses
- Scrap and downgrade per lot, by defect type
- Unplanned die changes and minutes lost
- Energy per heat
- Inspection escapes and requalification events
- New-part introduction time and ramp scrap
Reading
Where to go next
The pages that explain the mechanics.
Six layers, one loop
How the plant-edge runtime, orchestrator, agents, twin and cloud loop fit together.
How software is allowed to touch a press
The write path, the audit record and the data governance.
Three labelled walk-throughs
What a pilot on heating and fill, die life or inspection would do and measure.
Writing on forging and autonomy
The stroke is the moment of truth, autonomy as a dial, hit soundness before the stroke.
Typed tools, declared limits
The SDK and CLI design previews.
Per cell, per plant, per group
Tiers, the comparison table and the arithmetic a forge runs.
Run timeline · scenario
One scenario run, step by step
Every Forgiron run is an ordered, inspectable sequence. This is run_7c2e41 on Cell F-2 · 2,500 t closed-die press · 42CrMo4 connecting rod. Scenario completes in 10 steps with one approval gate. Surface temperature held at 1,205 °C with a 14 °C core-to-surface spread, fill predicted and confirmed complete, one lap precursor at the flash land cleared by a blow-energy trim, lot L-80412 released with full genealogy.
run_7c2e41
Cell F-2 · 2,500 t closed-die press · 42CrMo4 connecting rod
illustrative scenario
SUCCEEDED
-
01
ingest.order
SUCCEEDED
0.6 s
Plant Orchestrator · Pulled the part spec for the 42CrMo4 connecting rod from MES: forging window 1,180 to 1,230 °C, two-blow closed-die schedule, flash land 2.4 mm, temper to 28 to 32 HRC, 1,200 pieces. Locked the qualified process envelope.
-
02
twin.simulate
SUCCEEDED
52 s
Forge Twin · Simulated 24 candidate heat-and-stroke recipes on the as-forged twin for soak time, blow energy and spray timing, ranked on predicted fill, lap risk at the flash land, die load and kWh per piece.
-
03
heat.soak
SUCCEEDED
2 m 10 s
Heat-and-Billet · Induction power on IH-2 stepped down 4% in the final soak stage as the pyrometer read 1,205 °C at the surface. Core-to-surface spread estimated at 14 °C against a 20 °C limit, no overheat, scale growth inside the window.
-
04
die.spray
SUCCEEDED
48 s
Die-and-Lube · Lower-die spray dose raised 6% and cooling extended 0.3 s as die surface temperature climbed through 240 °C. Heat-check growth on cavity 2 flagged at 0.31 of the die-change threshold.
-
05
approve.human
APPROVAL
46 s
Plant Orchestrator · Recipe #9 moves second-blow energy 3% below the standing schedule. Press-schedule changes stay supervised on this part family, so the step was held for the shift forging engineer and approved at 05:47:31.
-
06
forge.stroke
SUCCEEDED
1 m 36 s
Forge-and-Press · Two-blow schedule executed with the approved energy. High-speed vision and force curves confirmed complete fill on the first ten pieces; predicted lap risk at the flash land fell from 0.27 to 0.08.
-
07
inspect.fuse
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Defect-and-Inspect · Eight cameras, two thermal cameras and the ultrasonic station fused at the edge. One lap precursor at the flash land on piece 212 flagged and cleared by a 1.5% blow-energy trim inside the approved envelope; the piece was routed to MPI and passed.
-
08
handle.transfer
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Robot-and-Handling · Press-to-trim transfer planned and executed by the handling robot at 11 s per piece, temperature loss in transfer 38 °C against a 60 °C limit, interlock zones clear throughout.
-
09
heat.treat
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Trim-and-Heat · Temper furnace HT-1 zone 2 trimmed 5 °C against the predicted hardness from the recorded heat and stroke history. First hardness checks read 30 HRC, inside 28 to 32.
-
10
lot.release
SUCCEEDED
1 m 20 s
Quality-and-Conformance · Lot L-80412 released: genealogy written (billet lot, heat curve, stroke record, die cycles, inspection map, approvals, temper record) and dispositioned against IATF 16949 criteria with cited evidence for the quality engineer's sign-off.
Autonomy
Four levels, set per agent and per tag
A forge does not go from manual to unattended in one step. Forgiron makes the level explicit, auditable and reversible at any time. The first release runs shadow mode, then assist mode, then bounded autonomy on low-risk actions. Press control stays supervised until the part family is qualified.
| Level | What the agent does | What the human does | Where it sits in a pilot |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 · Shadow | Reads thermal, vision, ultrasonic, MPI, press, die, robot and MES signals; predicts and recommends; writes nothing | Runs the cell as today; compares predictions to inspection and engineer outcomes | Shadow mode, baseline 30 to 60 days |
| L2 · Assist | Proposes heating, press, die-lube, routing and handling actions with evidence, confidence, envelope and rollback path | Approves each action in the review console | Assist mode, the remainder of a 90 to 180 day pilot |
| L3 · Bounded | Executes pre-approved low-risk actions: inspection routing, lube timing, heating and soak adjustments, robot path variants, inside PLC and safety limits | Approves press-schedule changes, die changes and lot release | Graduated autonomy, after audited accuracy and ROI |
| L4 · Scaled | Supervised press-schedule adaptation for qualified part families, across cells and sites | Sets the envelope; reviews the shift record and the evaluation results | Planned; after golden-dataset evaluation, simulation validation and quality sign-off |
Accelerated computing
Physical AI, at the press
A stroke lasts a fraction of a second and a billet cools while it waits. Perception has to be local, deterministic and fast, so Forgiron runs GPU inference at the plant edge and keeps training, simulation and optimisation in the cloud or on-prem.
Edge perception
8 to 24 cameras per line plus thermal, ultrasonic, MPI, press and ram streams fused at the cell. Sub-100 ms visual alerts and sub-500 ms recommendations are the design targets. Jetson Thor is planned for higher sensor density.
Model serving
Defect, ultrasonic and MPI fusion, die-wear, heating, press-fill, property and disposition models behind one orchestrator at the plant edge, routed by latency, tenant, sensitivity and cost, with canary rollout by cell.
Training
Multimodal defect, die-wear, heating, press-fill, property and quality-disposition models trained on thermal images, high-speed vision, ultrasonic and MPI signals, press curves and engineer corrections. Dedicated training capacity is planned.
Forge-line twin
Billet heating, die thermal state, press stroke, fill, stress, die load and robot handling simulated before the stroke. GPU forging FEM is the workload; physics-informed surrogates are planned so recipes rank at production cadence.
Synthetic data
Rare lap, fold, underfill, crack and die-wear scenarios generated and validated against real inspection distributions before promotion. Planned.
Optimisation
Die allocation, press sequencing, heating batches, heat-treat queues, robot and takt coordination and inspection routing.
Robot handling
Hot billet, forging, die and trim handling skills trained and validated in simulation before they run next to a press.
GPU ETL
Daily features from thermal, video, ultrasonic, MPI, press and genealogy data for retraining, drift detection and yield, scrap, die-life and energy benchmarks.
FAQ
Straight answers
The questions plant directors, forging engineers and quality engineers ask in the first meeting.
Yes, but only within an explicit tag allow-list with per-tag rate and magnitude limits, inside the qualified process envelope, and only at the autonomy level your plant has set. Design partners start in shadow mode, where Forgiron writes nothing. Press-schedule changes stay supervised by a named forging engineer until the part family is qualified.
Control returns to the furnace, press or die controller's last known-good state. Forgiron is a supervisory layer on top of the PLCs and interlocks you already run, never a replacement for them, so an outage degrades the cell to its current way of running, not to a stop.
Advisory recommendations start from the physics-based twin and the part spec in the first weeks. Defect, die-wear and heating prediction improve as cell history and labelled outcomes accumulate per part family. The first training sets are sized at 2 million labelled frames and signals, 20,000 heat and press cycles and 10,000 die-life events per design-partner cohort, all design targets.
Only if you choose cloud training. Die designs, part drawings, recipes, process models and quality records are isolated per tenant and never used to train another customer's models. A fully on-prem deployment at the plant edge is available for sensitive producers, and federated learning across sites is planned and waits on data-rights agreements.
You are, the same as with any control strategy, which is why every write is policy-checked, bounded, logged and reversible, and why anything above your risk threshold waits for a named approver. The audit log records the request, the evidence, the envelope applied and the human decision.
A paid pilot of 90 to 180 days on one cell, scoped to a single wedge with a success metric written into the order form: defect-detection accuracy, scrap reduction, die-change reduction, energy reduction or first-pass-quality improvement. The first 30 to 60 days baseline scrap, die life, energy, inspection escapes and takt in shadow mode.
Get started
Bring the inputs, we bring the baseline
Start with one heating, press, die or inspection cell and one measurable baseline. A paid pilot on billet heating and press fill, die life or ultrasonic and MPI defect detection shows the number before you commit further.