Springback characterization and behaviors of high-strength Ti-3Al-2.5V tube in cold rotary draw bending

Stress-relieved Ti-3Al-2.5V bent tube in hydraulic bleeding systems improves the overall performance of advanced aircraft and spacecraft due to its unique high specific strength. However, the high ratio of yield strength to Young's modulus may induce significant elastic recovery after unloading. The precision bending of the high strength Ti-tube (HSTT) depends on the understanding of the springback features and mechanisms. Using the plasticity deformation theory, the explicit/implicit 3D-FE and the physical experiments, the springback behaviors of the HSTT under multi-die constrained cold rotary draw bending (RDB) are addressed. The results show that: 1)The elastic recovery of the HSTT should be characterized by the significant angular springback, the radius growth and the sectional springback; Both the angular and radius springback should be compensated, while the sectional one decreases the cross-section flattening; 2) Among multiple parameters, both the material properties (Young's modulus, strength coefficient and anisotropy exponent) and the geometrical dimensions (bending angle and bending radius) dominate the unloading; Both the angular and radius springback values decrease with the smaller bending radii; The angular springback increases linearly with the larger bending angles, while the radius growth fluctuates little with the increasing of the bending angles at the later bending stages; Both the springback values of the HSTT are far larger than the ones of the 50520 Al-alloy tube and the 1Cr18Ni9Ti tube; The maximum variations of the angular and radius springback with changing of the processing parameters are 78% and 62.5% less than the maximum ones under different material properties and geometrical ones, respectively. 3) A two level springback compensation methodology is proposed to achieve the precision bending in terms of both springback angle and radius. Crown Copyright (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.