Investigation on Line Heating Technique with cooling and Determination of the heat paths by Strain-Based Method

Sheet Metals are widely used in different industries such as ship building. One important subject in these industries is to create the desired sheets through line heating process. In this paper, at first, the simulation of heat transfer between a gas torch and a plate during the line heating process is investigated. Impingement jet model is used to simulate the effect of a heat source (flame) and air cooling on the plate by using the commercial engineering software, FLUENT. Then, the computed temperature distribution by FLUENT is fed into the ANSYS FEM package for thermo Elasto-Plastic deformation analysis and the results are validated. Process execution needs heat paths and heat conditions. For this purpose heat paths of the cylindrical shape was obtained based on the Strain-Based Method. For thermal conditions a neural network was trained. In this regard, close to 63 different situations in different powers and torch speeds were run. Finally, to verify the thermal characteristics obtained for the cylindrical shape, paths and thermal conditions obtained was passed on a flat sheet metal by simulation and the result was compared with the desired shapes. It was shown that the Strain-Based Method in determining the thermal paths is very practical.