NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON PLATE FORMING USING THE TECHNIQUE OF LINE HEATING

Abstract

Nowadays manual and experiential technique patterns of line heating process could not meet the requirement of modern shipbuilding. Therefore, the automatic forming method is being an active research topic in manufacturing. An accurate and practical predicting method is an essential part of the automatic plate forming system. In the present work a numerical elasto-plastic thermo-mechanical model has been developed for predicting the thermal history and resulting deformation and residual stress field of line heating process. A moving Gaussian distributed heat source was used in the modelling to create a realistic simulation of the process. The transient temperature distributions were predicted using temperature-dependent material properties. The deformation and residual stress field were predicted based on the transient temperature distributions of line heating. Experiments were conducted to prove the validity of the numerical thermo-mechanical model. The final numerical results of temperature, deformation and residual stresses are in good agreement with experiment results. The proposed method presents a valuable reference for the study of similar thermal process.