The effect of the die failure affects the entire economy of the forging company including the cost of tooling, cost of repair, cost of maintenance, press downtimes, production lead times etc. According to a recent survey, as the batch size increases, the machine set up cost goes down (economy of scales), however the tooling cost increases. This technological challenge is the prime driver for our proposed research to explore plasma enhanced nanostructured surface treatments with the potential for die life increases of 3 -5X or better. These surface treatments have shown tremendous tribological advantage over conventional plasma nitriding in laboratory environment: low temperature plasma nitriding with a compound zone has 2X the fracture toughness and bonding strength; a-C:H:Si and CNT coatings 1/3 the friction factor; and the nanostructured-TiN has fracture toughness of one order of magnitude higher. In the proposed Phase I research, a major scientific challenge will be to generate these nanostructures using large scale production nitriding equipment, while another challenge would be to evaluate their tribological behavior in simulated environment that mimics the conditions in actual forging operations. Scientific issues in coating generation include environment design, reactive plasmas, species transport and contamination, stacking and nano-assembly etc.
