Laser forming has become a promising technique to form sheet metal in recent years. This new forming process can produce plastic deformation by thermal stresses resulted from the irradiation of laser beam scanning. In this paper, a 3-D thermo-mechanical FEM model was developed to simulate the laser forming process of shipbuilding steel plate. The finite-element software MSC. Marc was used to calculate the temperature field, stress field and strain field during laser forming process. The transient temperature field and the final bending angle were predicted. Then the effect of laser forming process technical parameters was studied. To evaluate the accuracy of the simulation, a laser forming experiment was performed. It is demonstrated that the finite element simulation results are in good agreement with experimental results.
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