Viscoplastic analysis of thin-walled tubes under cyclic bending

In this paper, different curvature-rates are controlled to highlight the characteristic of viscoplastic response in cyclic bending tests. The curvature-ovalization apparatus, which was designed by Pan et al. (1998), is used for conducting the curvature-controlled experiments on thin-walled tubular specimens for AISl 304 stainless steel under cyclic bending. The results reveals that the faster the curvature-rate implies, the fast degree of hardening of the metal tube. However, the ovalization of the tube cross-section increases when the curvature-rate increases.