A well-supported understanding of materials' behavior during the production of regular, special iron-base casts or other specific alloys aimed for special purposes or detailed studies for specific processes such as hot-forging and hot- or thermomechanical rolling and correlations with material properties coupled with heat treatments is often emphasized regarding improving material quality and reliability, increasing cost-effectiveness and many more. This also applies in other metallurgical fields such as during steel production incorporating the processing routes of primary, and secondary metallurgy and casting. Solid concepts are needed for the evaluation of sensible parameters to fine-tune final metallic products and their properties, and this cannot be possible without proper process optimization in metallurgy by including weighed technological maps specific to the industrial environment in question.
Process optimization should be considered as a system of many interactions complemented by their metallurgical background. An example of highly complex process optimization is the evaluation of process-dependent characteristics of special (coated) tools such as tools made of hot-work tool steels aimed for aluminium die casting or plastic moulding, etc. as shown in the next example.
