Objectives  A plate forming technique during ship construction will not only influence the cost and scheduling of fabrication, but also the accuracy of its formation will influence hydrodynamic performance and operating costs.

  Methods  In order to cope with such problems as low efficiency and poor accuracy during double-curvature plate forming, induction heating was used to provide an advanced heating source for plate bending with a typical sail shape. By using advanced thermal elastic plastic finite element (TEP FE) analysis and elastic FE analysis on the moment of bending, the mechanical response during plate bending was then represented, and the computed results strongly correlate with the measurements. Moreover, the plate forming process parameters' mechanism of influence was also clarified, and a method using linear approximation with an iterative bisection was proposed to obtain the line heating position and moving speed of the induction heating coil during induction heated plate formation, while the planned processing parameters were also validated and confirmed using a numerical analysis.

  Results  The computed out-of-plane bending deformation within the planned parameters well agrees with the target bending deformation.

  Conclusions  The engineering application of the plate bending method using linear approximation with iterative bisection has also been confirmed, which provides new solution for process parameter optimization during plate bending with induction heating.