Induction, furnaces, presses, hammers, ring mills
Equipment shipped Forgiron-ready, with the controller tags, limits and envelope declared at the factory. The agent runs on the OEM machine; the OEM keeps the machine relationship.
Partners
The channel is the machinery.
Forgiron's distribution plan runs through the companies already on the forge floor: forging-machinery, heating, die and inspection OEMs, MES vendors and the integrators who connect them. The programme opens with the design-partner cohort; nothing here is a signed partnership.
Illustrative scenario: Cell F-2 · 2,500 t closed-die press · 42CrMo4 connecting rod, one lot, one approval gate
Partner types
Who fits, and how
How each kind of partner fits the plan.
Die shops, lubricant and spray equipment
Die genealogy and spray control through Diesmith. The die maker keeps the design; Forgiron adds the life prediction and the closed loop.
Ultrasonic, MPI, vision, dimensional
Station data fused into Flawnex. The vendor keeps the measurement; Forgiron adds the prediction, the root cause and the cited disposition.
Orders, genealogy, forging FEM
Genealogy written back into the system of record, and FEM models exchanged with the twin. Evidence packets for customer and qualification review.
OT, plant networks, handling cells
Connection, tag inventory, robot cells and the shadow-mode weeks of a pilot, delivered by people the forge already trusts.
Design partners
The first three to five forges shape the roadmap and get written access terms. See the customers page.
How it works
What a partner does and gets
The outline of the programme as planned.
A partner does
- Declares the tags, limits, envelopes and interfaces on the systems they ship or support
- Co-delivers the shadow-mode and assist-mode weeks of a pilot
- Brings a forge with a metric and a signed baseline
A partner gets
- A Forgiron-ready designation for the machine, station or MES, once the connector is proven
- A share of the Cell and Plant subscription on forges they bring
- Early access to the SDK and the twin for their own engineering
Integrations
It speaks forge, not cloud
Forgiron reads and writes through the systems already on the floor. No rip and replace, no parallel historian, no new HMI to learn. Vendor names are examples of systems found in forges, not certified integrations; connector availability is confirmed per site.
Induction and furnace PLCs (EFD Induction, Ajax TOCCO, Inductotherm, SMS group class systems)
Power, zone and soak reads, guarded writes
Press, hammer and ring-mill controls (SMS group, Schuler, Ajax, Sumitomo and Nedschroef, Danieli class systems)
Force, ram and energy reads; supervised schedule writes
Spray, lubrication and die-cooling systems
Dose, pattern, timing and cooling
Thermal cameras, pyrometers, high-speed cameras at the press
Billet and die temperature, fill, surface defects
Ultrasonic and MPI stations and dimensional systems (Waygate, Evident, Magnaflux class systems)
Scans, indications and dimensions per part
Forging FEM packages (Transvalor Forge, Simufact Forming, QForm, DEFORM class tools)
Model and result exchange with the twin
Robots, manipulators and safety PLCs
Pose, grip and path state inside interlocked limits
Austenitize, quench and temper furnaces
Zone, quench and temper reads, guarded writes
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.
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
Talk about partnering
Tell us what you ship or support and which forges run it.