Cold Working


Quick
Cold working is the simultaneous deformation and strengthening of an alloy.


Cold working (also known as cold forming) is metal forming performed at room temperature or slightly above.

Advantages
Significant advantages of cold forming compared to hot working are:

Owing to this combination of advantages, many cold forming processes have developed into important mass-production operations. They provide close tolerances and good surfaces, minimizing the amount of machining required and permitting these operations to be classified as net shape or near net shape processes.


Disadvantages
There are certain disadvantages or limitations associated with cold forming operations:

In some operations, the metal must be annealed in order to allow further deformation to be accomplished. In other cases, the metal is simply not ductile enough to be cold worked.

To overcome the strain hardening problem and reduce forces and power requirements, many forming operations are performed at elevated temperatures. There are two elevated temperature ranges involved, giving rise to the terms warm working and hot working.


Characteristics

There are a number of advantages and limitations to strengthening a metal by cold working or strain hardening: