2011 Volume 29 Issue 3 Pages 210-217
This report deals with effects of heating direction on laser forming which is used to form curved surface with thin plate. When we conduct laser forming to create suitable results, it is one of some important problems where and how much we should put in-plane strain into a thin plate. Some researchers have presented a new development method with curvature lines as a solution to that problem. Curvature line can be obtained as a result to combine primary curvature directions. In-plane strain is calculated from distance change of these lines. Heating direction is chosen parallel to curvature line because in-plane strain is put as transverse shrinkage caused by heating. In this case, heating direction is fixed on the plate, not changeable, even if side lines of a product is changed, because curvature line direction is unique for the curved surface.
Geodesic in-plane method we have proposed can show in-plane strain for every direction, so that we can select heating direction as you want to do.
In this report, we study experimentally the effects of heating direction on laser forming of saddle curved surface for a situation where we chose heating direction freely based on the geodesic in-plane method. As a result, we learn following three points, saddle surface can be created along another heating direction of curvature line, bend effect exists because of transverse shrinkage, and symmetrical heating line set can avoid curved surface shift.
