This chapter provides a practical overview of the tools and techniques used to assess the tribological aspects of metal forming processes. It describes test methods that have been developed to evaluate bulk deformation and sheet metal forming processes along with lubricant rheology, friction forces, and stress and strain distributions. It explains how to measure temperature between tooling and workpiece surfaces as well as surface topography and composition, film thickness, and wear. It also discusses the benefits of reduced-scale and simulation testing and the transfer of results from one process to another.

The mechanical behavior of a material is its response to an applied load or force. Important mechanical properties are strength, hardness, stiffness, and ductility. This chapter discusses three principal ways in which these properties are tested: tension, compression, and shear. Important tensile properties that can be determined by the tensile test include yield strength, ultimate tensile strength, ductility, resilience, and toughness. The chapter describes the effects of stress concentrations on ductile metals under cyclic loads. Other topics covered include combined stresses, yield criteria, and residual stresses of metals.

This chapter explains how to determine flow stress and forgeability using data from tensile tests, compression tests, ring tests, and torsion tests. It describes sample preparation, tooling and equipment, test procedures, error sources, and data plotting techniques. It also provides a significant amount of experimentally derived flow stress data, including K and n values for steel, copper, and aluminum alloys, C and m values (at various temperatures) for steel, aluminum, copper, titanium, and other alloys, and average flow stress for several alloys determined by compression testing.