PhD Studentship: NSF Swarf: A novel forging processes for closed loop recycling of metallic swarf

Start Date – 1^st March 2027 (latest)

Project Description 

Machining generates large quantities of swarf, with many components losing 60–90% of their material during the machining stage. This swarf is typically collected and discarded, where it becomes mixed with other grades and loses much of its inherent value.

The University of Warwick has recently secured a patent for a novel forging technique in which pre-compacted swarf is heated to just below the melting point of the material and then deformed. Done correctly, this fusion bonds the material together. The route allows waste swarf to be forged directly back into blanks before it is scrapped and mixed, enabling high-purity swarf to be reused with a minimal carbon footprint. The potential is twofold:

• Companies can buy less raw material, using these new blanks (initially) for non safety-critical components.
• High-value materials such as nickel superalloys and stainless steels can have their swarf forged into briquettes and fed into lower-value markets — for example, aerospace-grade swarf could be consolidated and used at a fraction of the price in rail or naval applications.

We are looking for a talented, motivated individual to establish the process window for this technique across several materials and to assess the extent to which the patented material properties are realised. To identify the optimal processing conditions, a range of forging dies will be designed to allow processing of different shapes (strains), at different temperatures and at different forging rates. The project runs alongside the commercialisation of the process, and will therefore also support the metallurgical assessment of commercial products and their consistency.

The PhD will be broken down roughly as follows:

• Developing a fundamental understanding of forging microstructures and forging types.
• Hands-on near-solidus forging (NSF) of swarf under a range of processing conditions.
• Microstructural and mechanical assessment of the forged components, and definition of the underlying mechanisms behind a good forging.
• Potential for complementary modelling to predict strain pathways for given component geometries.

As a PhD candidate you will join the Advanced Steel Research Team, working alongside leading academics, researchers, project engineers and fellow PhD candidates. The group takes a holistic approach to metallic materials, examining the fundamentals and how they influence full-scale production.

For further enquiries regarding the position and the application procedure, please contact Dr Carl Slater (c.d.slater@warwick.ac.uk) or Sumit Hasra (sumit.hasra@warwick.ac.uk).

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