Study on Application of Flexible Forming Technology for Curved Plate Forming using Thick Plate

후판의 곡면 가공을 위한 가변성형기술 적용 연구

Generally, in shipbuilding, large curved block components which have large curvature radius along various directions are used for huge ships such as LPG-vessel and oil tanker ships. Lots of the blocks are manufactured by line heating method which uses a heat source to bend the thick plate materials. The conventional forming process is entirely dependent on the experience of experts because it is done by manual method thus the curvatures and qualities are not uniform even for same part. However, it is hard to adopt the press forming process using die tool sets fur the manufacturing because of the characteristics of the industry that based on the small quantity and variety in the products. In this study, flexible forming technology using numbers of punches is investigated based on the simulation to substitute for the conventional forming method. Thick plate material model was applied to the proposed process to verify the feasibility for hull structure block forming process. The press forming processes were simulated by adopting the explicit-to-implicit sequential solution. Moreover, experiment of the flexible forming process was also conducted and its results were compared with that of simulation.