The expert system supporting the assessment of the durability of forging tools

The paper presents an idea of an expert system for determining the quantitative contributions of four principal mechanisms (abrasive wear, thermo-mechanical fatigue, plastic deformation, and mechanical fatigue) to the degradation of forging tools and the geometric die impression loss for a selected industrial hot forging process. The knowledge needed to solve the problem is encoded in a system knowledge base in the form of rules. The knowledge base contains elements of both theoretical knowledge about destructive phenomena and empirical knowledge gained from the experience of the authors and industry experts (forge employees) as well as from a statistical analysis of measurement data for selected forging process parameters. The knowledge is processed through automatic inference based on fuzzy logic rules.