Tube Bending Forming Technologies: Advances and Trends

Bent tube parts have been widely used, as one kind of key components with enormous quantities and diversities, to satisfy the increasing demands for lightweight and high-performance products in broad industries such as aerospace, marine, automobile, energy, and health care. Tube bending is one of the key technologies used for manufacturing these lightweight products. The recent advances in tube bending are critically reviewed from four fundamental issues in tube bending, viz. characterization of tubular materials, prediction of multiple defects, bending formability, and innovative optimization design. Advantages and limitations of some recently developed innovative bending approaches are reviewed. Finally, considering the urgent requirements of more lightweight and high-performance bent tubes with hard-to-deform materials with complex structures, the development trends and corresponding challenges are thereafter presented for realizing the precision and high-efficiency tube bending.