A study on prediction of the size of heat affected zone in oxy-ethylene flame cutting of steel plates

A prediction of the size of the heat affected zone (HAZ) should be made before cutting to select the proper cutting parameters and to reduce the size of the HAZ. A series of cutting experiments were carried out in this study by using an oxy-ethylene flame to obtain the widths of the HAZ for the I and V grooves of steel plates, and the effects due to variations in the cutting parameters were also investigated. The relationship between the cutting parameters and the widths of the HAZ were deduced by using a recursion technique as a statistical method, and simplified equations were derived in order to relate the widths of the HAZ and the cutting parameters. In order to verify the relationship obtained from the experiments, thermal analyses with numerical simulations were carried out based on the finite element method (FEM) to predict the sizes of HAZs as the cutting parameters varied. The results of the numerical analysis were compared to those obtained through experiments, and the comparison revealed that the numerical analyses were well matched to realistic cutting processes.