Currently the whole Italian industry suffers the competition from emerging markets. All the social partners realized that our low-tech products and know-how are unlikely to be competitive in comparison with those produced at lower cost in other emerging countries. Historically, the Italian metalworking and mechanical engineering industry, and in particular the construction sector as complex welded pressure vessels, large structures for civil and shipbuilding, is considered among the best and the most famous in the world, this is because our products are recognized as being of excellent overall quality, with a touch of design and typical Italian good taste, which is difficult to reproduce or to copy. We still have many customers who come to the metalworking and mechanical engineering companies to buy Italian welded because in this way they have reasonable assurance that your product has the quality standards required by international standards and their internal specifications. At this point, it becomes essential that the national metalworking and mechanical engineering industry points to increase its know-how and to develop new technologies and products which are higher than those already on the market. In this context it should be framed this "Doctoral thesis" that documents a part of the enormous economic effort and resources in research and development expenses that a typical Italian company has made in order to demonstrate to its customers to have technological knowledge and production capacity at the spearhead which can guarantee them a finished product with quality, better technology and more advanced than those that could be found somewhere else. The company to which you refer is the De Pretto Industrie in Schio, near Vicenza, in what once was called by many the heart of the Italian metalworking and mechanical engineering industry, and their group company forging master FOC Ciscato. With this background, the idea of Doctoral Thesis proposed which describes the research and development of metallurgical problems and weldability for products of De Pretto Industrie and FOC Ciscato. Realized during the three years of the PhD and developed, in collaboration with the University of Padova, within the normal industrial production of the Companies to which I belong; and that for their innovative aspects were considered worthy of publication. In particular the following specific topics have been analyzed and studied:
• Development of a welding procedure blade-crown and shaft-rotor forged by rotor of a steam turbine
• Manufacturing problems on the close die and open die forging pieces in super duplex stainless steel
• Characterization of welded joints in super duplex stainless steel for Offshore applications
• Comparative analysis of the methods for the determination of the percentage of ferrite for steel welded joints duplex stainless stee
