LAUSR

ABSTRACT This paper mainly investigated the nondimensional relation between technological parameters and thermal forming behaviour for the ship hull plate by induction heating, which can be evaluated by maximum temperature Tum, breadth b and depth h of the heat-affected zone (HAZ). The mutually coupled electromagnetic-thermal analysis procedure considering temperature-dependent material properties at each step for the opposite-direction current-carrying inductor with the gap (ODIG) was implemented and validated by an experiment. L25(56) designs of the orthogonal test relative to five technological parameters were then conducted to yield Tum, b and h. Afterwards, critical technological parameters were obtained for Tum based on the ANOVA method, and subsequently utilised for major nondimensional factors through dimensional and correlation analyses. Finally, predictive relations of Tum, b and h were derived by multivariate regression. Furthermore, 18 sets of predicted Tum, b and h were employed for bending angular deformations, which were consistent with those from previous method.