Effect of heat treatment on the bending behavior of aluminum alloy tubes

Quasistatic experiments and numerical simulations were performed to investigate the three-point bending behavior of different temper AA6082 tubes in this study. The effect of heat treatment on the samples was investigated by microstructural analyses. Temper designations of T6, T4 and O were applied to the samples to study the load-carrying capacity and bendability of AA6082 tubes. The samples with T4 and O tempers show appropriate bendability of up to the punch travel distance of 60 mm under low-punch forces. However, the samples with T6 temper require three times more punch force than the other temper samples. Furthermore, the T6 temper samples cannot hold their structural integrity. Therefore, crack formation occurred at the enhanced bending angle stages. Experimental results were compared with the numerical simulation outputs, and the deformation mechanism was observed with finite element method. In addition, various element formulations in the numerical simulations were compared in terms of bending force and computational time. Based on the numerical results, element formulations exhibit different performances with respect to temper conditions.