An Efficient Manufacturing Simulation Model for Doubly Curved Structures in Shipbuilding

This paper reports an efficient ‘Finite Element analysis (FEA)’ simulation model to study the line heating process for simulating the manufacturing process of doubly curved structures. The simulation model is implemented with commercially available software (Ansys *TM Mechanical APDL) and the source of thermal energy is assumed to be a ‘Gaussian’ distributed heat flux.The temperature dependent material properties are considered and the thermal history and resulting structural deformations of a standard plate due to single pass line of heating are estimated with numerical simulation. The presented results are compared with the available experimental results from existing literature. The deformation patterns of a plate due to line heating in different orientations are analyzed using the simulation model and the deformation pattern is utilized to devise efficient heating strategies.