• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.29 no.11
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• pp.1190-1198
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• 2012

A hot forming of large thick Al plate using a grid-type hybrid die is a process to make a shell plate for the production of a spherical LNG tank. This process is characterized by using a grid-typed die with an additional air cooling system for reducing the cooling time of the heated plate after hot forming. The process consists of the plate's feeding, heating, forming and cooling in detail and each of them is continuously performed along the rail. This paper was designed to propose the analytical and experimental methods for determining the convection and interfacial heat transfer coefficients required in hot forming analysis of Al plate. These values in the analysis are to reproduce numerically the cooling performance of grid-typed die and cooling device. Interfacial heat transfer was obtained from the heat transfer experiments for different pressures and inverse analysis method. To verify the efficiency of the coefficient values obtained from above methods, FE analysis and experiment of the hot spherical-forming process were conducted for a small-scaled model. The convection coefficient was also calculated from flow analysis of air released by cooling device within grid-typed die using ANSYS-CFX.

• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.316-323
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• 2011

The hot curvature-forming of large aluminum thick plate using a grid-typed hybrid die is a process for the production of a spherical LNG tank. Many variables such as the initial die surface quality, grid size, grid thickness, size of blank plate and cooling line design, control the success of the process. In addition, the plate used in this process is generally larger than $10{\times}10m$ in size. Thus, it is very difficult to predict the surface characteristics of the plate during forming and to measure the different parameters due to the high cost of the experiments. In order to optimize the process design for the grid-type die, the development of an analytical method to predict the surface characteristics of the final product in hot curvature-forming is needed. This paper described the development of the method and procedures for FE simulations of the hot curvature-forming process, including hot forming, air flow, cooling, and thermal deformation analyses. An experiment for a small scale model of the process was conducted to check the validity of the numerical method. The results showed that the curvature of the plate in the analysis agrees well with that of the experiment within 0.037 and 0.016% tolerance margins for its side and corner, respectively.