Effects of Heating Conditions in the Straightening of Sheet Metal Distortion

Use of sheet metal structure is increased in various fields such as automobile, aerospace and communication equipment industry. When this structure is welded, welding distortion is generated due to the non-uniformity of temperature distribution. Recently welding distortion becomes a matter of great importance in the structure manufacture industry because it deteriorates the product's quality by bringing about shape error. Accordingly many studies for solving the problems by controlling the welding distortion are being performed. However, it is difficult to remove all kinds of distortion by welding process, though various kinds of methods for reducing distortion are applied to production. Consequently, straightening process is operated if the high precision quality is requested after welding. The local heating method induces compression plastic deformation by thermal expansion in the heating stage and then leaves constriction of length direction in the cooling stage. Accordingly, in the case of sheet metal structure, straightening effect is expected by heating for the part of distortion. This study includes numerical analysis of straightening effect by the local heating method in distortion comes from production of welded sheet metal structure. Particularly straightening effect followed by dimensions of heating area is analyzed according to the numerical analysis. The numerical analysis is performed by constructing 3-dimensional finite element model for 0.4mm stainless steel-sheet metal. Results of this study confirm that straightening effect changes as heating area increases and the optimum value of heating area that proves the maximum straightening effect exists.

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