Numerical and experimental analysis on cold-forming and spring-back of hull plate

Abstract

Ship hull structures are fabricated by curved thick plates before they are welded together. There are traditional methods such as, line heating and laser-forming methods for plate bending. However, it is recognized that the hot-forming technology causes a series of troubles on doubly or multiple curved plates. Multi-point forming mechanism with square press heads is a new forming process for three-dimensional ship hull plate. Cold-forming has a high dimensional accuracy but results in spring-back. The spring-back process of curved thick plates in the finite element method is analyzed and the predicted results are compared with the test results in the present paper. To ensure the forming precision, the successive approximation method is also developed and verified to control the spring-back.