34th Plenary Meeting in Tsukuba, Japan

September 23-28, 2001

The 34th ICFG Plenary Meeting was held in Tsukuba, Japan, from September 23rd to 28th 2001, hosted by Prof. Akira Azushima. 23 members and 17 guests from 11 countries attended the meeting, which was chaired by Dr. Jens Grønbæk from Strecon A/S, Denmark and supported by Prof. Karl Kuzman, University of Ljubljana, as the Technical Secretary and by Mr. Nicolas Tiesler who runs the temporary Secretary’s office in Erlangen.

The ICFG delegates welcomed Prof. T. Nakamura (Japan), Dr. Landgrebe (Germany) and Mr. Meidert (Liechtenstein) as new full members as well as two new corresponding members, Prof. Yang (Korea) and Mr. Yamanaka (Japan). Prof. Marziniak (Poland) and Prof. Tozawa (Japan) were elected as honorary and Prof. Sekiguchi (Japan) and Prof. Kondo (Japan) as emeritus members. Thus, the present status of membership comes to 24 member countries with 49 full members, 14 corresponding members, 8 emeritus members and 5 honorary members.
The participants supported the idea to invite more industrial partners and establish a new category of membership for companies. Up to now the ICFG offers only personal memberships. The Advisory Board will elaborate a proposal on their next meeting.

Based on the subgroup activities, the following ICFG documents were accepted for publishing: “Tool life and tool quality in cold forging – Part 1: General Aspects in Tool Life” and “Cold forging of Aluminium”. Both documents should be available at Meisenbach in 2002. Furthermore, the new documents No. 11/01 “Steels for Cold Forging – their behaviour and selection” and No. 12/01 “Warm Forging of Steels” were presented. Both documents can be purchased at Meisenbach for € 30 each.
Dr. Hänsel, chairman of the subgroup “Tool life and tool quality in cold forging” also presented the structure of the Part 2 of their document, which is planned to be finished by the end of the year 2003. Prof. Tekkaya, chairman of the subgroup “Process Simulation” reported about the workshop in Ankara (May 2001) and the program for the next workshop in Padua (April/June 2002). The presentations and results of both workshops will be published in booklets.

During the Plenary Meeting a special contribution was presented by the 2001 ICFG Prize winner Mr. Nicolas Tiesler. His prize paper “Microforming – size effects in friction and their influence on extrusion processes” will be published in WIRE in 2002.

Next year the ICFG is sponsoring the 7th ICTP, which will be held in Yokohama, Japan. On this occasion the JSTP informed the Plenary Meeting that they would use this opportunity again to honour one of the most distinguished researchers with their JSTP International Prize. Proposals for candidates are still awaited.
On the third day of the meeting, the ICFG members and guests participated the Joint meeting with the Japanese Forging Group of JSTP. The program consisted of three parts: Memorial lectures for Late Prof. Kudo, Introduction of activities of ICFG and Subgroups, Recent research of forging in Japan. The participants with great respect spent one minute in deep silence to thank the late Prof. Kudo who contributed so much to the welfare of the ICFG.

During the last two days the participants visited companies in Narita Area. They were delighted at the R&D efforts and their industrial implementations at Honda Motor Co., Ltd; Hitachi Cable, Ltd and Yamanaka Engineering Co., Ltd. A visit to the historic site of Nikko was also included.

The 35th ICFG Plenary Meeting will be held from September 1st to 4th 2002 in Helsinki / Finnland and hosted by Prof. Kivivuori.

Nicolas Tiesler, Karl Kuzman