Abstract
In the shipyard, line heating and triangle heating are two major processes for forming curved plates in various shapes. While there have been many studies on line heating, triangle heating has been rarely studied due to its complicated heating process with irregular multi-heating paths and highly concentrated heat input. As the triangle heating process is one of the most labor-consuming jobs in shipyards, it is essential to study the automation as well as improvement of triangle heating process in order to increase hull forming productivity. In this study, a pioneering attempt to simulate triangle heating was made. A circular disk-spring model was proposed for elasto-plastic analysis procedure of triangle heating and the inherent strain method was also used to analyze the deformation of plates. Simulation results were compared with those of experiments and showed good agreement. It is shown that the present approach including analysis model used in this study is effective to simulate the triangle heating for plate forming process in shipbuilding.