During the low- speed running of heavy die- forging press,creeping and jittering may occur mainly due to the existence of nonlinear friction. In this paper,first,a dynamic performance test system of a 40 MN die- forging press running at low speed was established.Next,some isothermal die- forging experiments were carried out to obtain the acceleration of the cross- beam of the press running at the speed of less than 5μm/s.Then,based on the Stribeck nonlinear friction model,the friction parameters were identified and verified by using the particle swarm optimization algorithm.Finally，a T- S fuzzy model was constructed to describe the nonlinear friction of heavy die-forging press and was applied to a friction feedforward compensation control system.The results show that the Stri-beck model well describes the nonlinear friction of the die- forging press running at low speed and that the proposed feedforward compensation scheme based on the T- S fuzzy model greatly improves the dynamic performance of the system in the presence of nonlinear friction.