An improved method of computing heating information for triangle heating for an automated thermal forming system

Abstract

In this paper, a novel method of computing heating information for triangle heating is proposed for improving the accuracy of forming in an automated thermal forming system. The current method of computing heating information through triangle heating cannot be readily used for an automated thermal forming system because of a limited range of plates that the method can handle, and undesirable deformation on the boundary such as “over-bending” and buckling when the plate is heated using the computed heating information. Therefore, a lot of man-hours are required for correcting such defects, leading to delayed fabrication in the downstream fabrication processes. In order to overcome these problems, a method is developed using formulae for handling an extended range of plates, and considering the effect of the initial curvature of a plate in the computation of heating information. Various examples used in the ship construction show that the proposed method can improve the forming accuracy of the automated thermal forming system. © 2018 Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. All rights reserved.