Numerical Simulation And Experimental Research On Laser Forming Of Moderately Thick Ship Building Steel

Laser forming is a recently developed sheet metal forming technology. IN the process the nonuniform thermal stress induced by laser irradiation is utilized to form sheet metal into different shapes. Compared with conventional sheet metal forming process, it has many advantages: during the laser forming process,no external forces and hard dies are required, with this process,a variety of shapes can be formed and even brittle materials may be deformed. These make laser forming can be applied in aerospace, shipbuilding,automobile,microelectronic industries and so on.In this paper,the laser forming process of moderate-thick ship building steel plate is simulated by FEM software ANSYS.A 3-D coupled thermal-structural FEM simulation is carried out ; the temperature , deformation and stress distribution of irradiated plate are simulated; these fields are analyzed and a series of conclusions are summarized:steel plate will be bended around the x-axis,and the dimension will increase in X-axis and Y-axis direction.Corresponding experiments are performed to evaluate the accuracy of the numerical simulation. A laser sensor is used for deformation detection,and a thermocouple is used for temperature detection during the experiment. It is found that the experimental results agree well with simulated results. For further analysis, the experiments of laser forming are performed with different scanning speeds,laser powers,laser focal dimensions and scan times. The conclusion is made that in a certain range,the bending angle of laser forming increases with the scanning speed decreasing,the laser power increasing,the laser focal dimension decreasing,or the scan times increasing.