Thermo-mechanical analysis of line heating process by an efficient and accurate multi-level mesh refining method

Plate forming technique with line heating is indispensable for producing curved plates of ship hulls. The present study aims to reduce the tremendous computation time in transient thermal-mechanical analysis of line heating with a moving heat source. The dynamic mesh refining method developed by the authors was extended to simulate large scale plate forming process by line heating. The current method features an element orientation-based multi-level refinement scheme which greatly reduces the number of degrees of freedom in a finite element model. Meanwhile, the background mesh introduced in the dynamic mesh refining method was used to save and update global solution. Accuracy of the refining method was demonstrated by parallel line heating on a square plate with available experimental results. Furthermore, the performance of proposed method was examined through comparison with a general purpose commercial code. It was confirmed that, the new code has comparable accuracy while the computational efficiency is more than one order higher than the commercial code. The transient thermo-mechanical analysis of line heating on a large-scale plate was accomplished within a realistic time.