• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.39 no.7
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• pp.721-727
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• 2015

The mechanical components for wind turbines are mainly manufactured using open-die forging. This research introduces an advanced forging method to produce the door frame of the tubular wind turbine tower. The advantages of this new forging method are an increase in the raw material utilization ratio and a reduction in energy cost. In the conventional method, the door frame is hot forged with a hydraulic press and amounts of material are machined out because of the shape difference between the forged and final machine products. The proposed forging method is composed of hot forging and ring rolling processes to increase the material utilization ratio. The effectiveness of this new forging method is deeply related to the ring rolled blank dimension before the final forging. To get the optimal ring rolled blank, forged shape prediction using the finite element analysis method was applied. The forged dimensions produced by the new forging method were verified through the first article production.