A hot forming of large thick Al plate using a grid-type hybrid die is a process to make a shell plate for the production of a spherical LNG tank. This process is characterized by using a grid-typed die with an additional air cooling system for reducing the cooling time of the heated plate after hot forming. The process consists of the plate’s feeding, heating, forming and cooling in detail and each of them is continuously performed along the rail. This paper was designed to propose the analytical and experimental methods for determining the convection and interfacial heat transfer coefficients required in hot forming analysis of Al plate. These values in the analysis are to reproduce numerically the cooling performance of grid-typed die and cooling device. Interfacial heat transfer was obtained from the heat transfer experiments for different pressures and inverse analysis method. To verify the efficiency of the coefficient values obtained from above methods, FE analysis and experiment of the hot spherical-forming process were conducted for a smallscaled model. The convection coefficient was also calculated from flow analysis of air released by cooling device within grid-typed die using ANSYS-CFX.
