MATREX project allowed us to highlight interesting performances of some materials which could be alternative to make shaping tools, in particular for glass moulds and forging tools, as well as wearing parts for energy sector

The tests serials done with different technologies or methods was crossed and this allowed to select materials or material elaboration methods hopeful. Details of these selectionned methods and materials will be available in the conclusions of the MATREX project.

Throught the MATREX project and the feed-back from glass, forging, casting and energy professionals, two major issues emerge:

Tools lubrication is a main step for preservation and lifetime of them. Nevertheless, this lubrication step is sometime the origin of bad consequences for environment and industry.

Indeed, presence of some lubricant’s components is less and less wished in the industry due to their relative harmfulness for environment. So, moulds’s cleaning and maintenance to remove lubricant’s residues are quite contrainsting.

For this reason, many manufacturers have the long-term objective of reducing or even eliminating the use of lubricants during the glass shaping stage.

Considerations about request for change some lubricants’s composition, according with the REACH regulation, are often done by industry. However, modification  of structure or composition’s lubricant have consequences for their performance.

Add to these consideration, there is for industry, the issue of the real-time monitoring for their tools’s damage, for optimize the finish products flow and avoid scraps, and the wish to find efficient means for moulds’s cleaning/stripping.

There is also a desire to make available for hot toolings’s professionals, diagnostic tools allowing predict the lifetime of their materials.

Wearing parts for high temperature or high energy (refractories, ceramics…) have similar issues than glasses’s moulds or forging tools. The relative empiricism for define and calculate shaping grades and material optimization (shape, design) leads to reducing lifetime of parts and tools, so maintenance costs and random reproductibility. Moreover, valorization and recycling issues are often overlooked, or not taken into account. It is certain that with the notion of assembling several materials, this point becomes a key factor in the success of the choice of this or that material (metallic, ceramic, composite, …).

It’s in this context that this research project is implemented. To deal with these issues, the initial consortium of MATREX project, with an additional partner, will try to bring solution’s proposals and working methodologies transferable at the industrial scale, at the end of this new project MATREX 2.