• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.57-62
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• 2015

A large variety of pipe flanges are required in the marine and construction industry. Pipe flanges are usually welded or screwed to the pipe end and are connected with bolts. This approach is very simple and has been widely used for a long time; however, it results in high development costs and low productivity, and the products made through this approach usually have safety problems in the welding area. In this research, a new approach for forming pipe flanges based on cold forging and the floating die concept is presented. This innovative approach increases the effectiveness of the material usage and saves time and costs compared with the conventional welding method. To ensure the dimensional accuracy of the final product, finite element analysis (FEA) was carried out to simulate the process of cold forging, and orthogonal experiment methods were used to investigate the influence of four manufacturing factors (stroke of distance, pin die angle, forming of pipe diameter, and speed of the die) and predict the best combination of them. The manufacturing factors were obtained through numerical and experimental studies, which show that the approach is very useful and effective for the forming of pipe flanges and could be widely used in the future.