SUMMARYAn ecient approach to Coulomb frictional law in non-steady-state metal forming simulation is presented in this paper. The plastic¯ow problem is formulated by a rigid-viscoplastic ®nite element method with emphasis on frictional laws. A detailed comparison of the Coulomb frictional law with the constant shear friction law is made through ®nite element analysis of a pancake-like gear forging process. An iterative approach to converging normal stresses in the Coulomb frictional law is introduced and its numerical characteristics are investigated in detail. Based on the convergence and numerical characteristics of the iterative approach, an application-oriented scheme, called the non-iterative scheme, is proposed. It has been shown that one can obtain quite accurate solutions in forging applications with computational eciency and numerical stability by the non-iterative scheme for the Coulomb frictional law.