Line heating is used in forming the complex curve plates of ships, and this process is becoming integrated into automated tools. Induction heating equipment has become commonly used in automatic line heating. When applying automated equipment, it is necessary to calculate the relationship between the heating parameters and the temperature field. Numerical methods are primarily used to accomplish the calculations for induction heating. This computation process requires repeated iterations to obtain a stable heat generation rate. Once the heat generation rate changes significantly, a recalculation takes place. Due to the relative position of the coil and plate changes during heating, the grid needs to be frequently re-divided during computation, which dramatically increases the total computation time. In this paper, through an analysis of the computation process for induction heating, the root node that restricts the computation efficiency in the conventional electromagnetic-thermal computation process was found. A method that uses a Gaussian function to represent the heat flux was proposed to replace the electromagnetic computation. The heat flux is the input for calculating the temperature field, thus avoiding the calculation of the electromagnetic analysis during induction heating. Besides, an equivalence relationship for multi-coil was proposed in this paper. By comparing the results of the experiment and the numerical method, the proposed heat source model’s effectiveness was verified.

The main hull of a ship is made up of a large number of plates with complex curvatures. Line heating is one of the main approaches used in the forming of a ship hull plate. Because line heating is based on manual heating using a handheld oxyacetylene gun, the typical heating width is extremely narrow. With the development of computer control technology, a newly developed automated plate forming equipment is available and its heat source is typically an electromagnetic induction coil. The temperature field and the induction coil size are correlated. However, investigations into the induction coil size are scarce. In this study, the effect that the induction coil width has on both the forming shape and processing efficiency is investigated via simulation and test. The results show that a moderate expansion of the induction coil width at different input powers has an insignificant impact on forming shapes that is attainable by common line heating. However, as the heating width expands with the expansion of the induction coil width, the number of the processing lines via line heating is reduced which improves the processing efficiency.