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In a variety of modern, multi-phase steels, damage evolves during plastic deformation in the form of the nucleation, growth and coalescence of voids in the microstructure. These microscopic sites play a vital role in the evolution of the materials’ mechanical properties, and therefore the later performance of bent products, even without having yet led to macroscopic cracking. However, the characterization and quantification of these diminutive sites is complex and time-consuming, especially when areas large enough to be statistically relevant for a complete bent product are considered. Here, we propose two possible solutions to this problem: an advanced, SEM-based method for high-resolution, large-area imaging, and an integral approach for calculating the overall void volume fraction by means of density measurement. These are applied for two bending processes, conventional air bending and radial stress superposed bending (RSS bending), to investigate and compare the strain- and stress-state dependent void evolution. RSS bending reduces the stress triaxiality during forming, which is found to diminish the overall formation of damage sites and their growth by the complimentary characterization approaches of high-resolution SEM and global density measurements.

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Kinematic bending of profiles allows to manufacture parts with high flexibility concerning the geometry. Still, the production of profiles with asymmetric cross-sections regarding the force application axis using kinematic bending processes offers challenges regarding springback and warping. These geometric deviations can be reduced by partial, cross-sectional heating during the process as it lowers the flow stress locally. In this work, the influence of partial, cross-sectional heating during a three-roll push-bending process on the warping and springback of L-profiles is investigated. Numerical and experimental methods reveal the influence of temperature on warping and springback. A newly developed analytical model predicts the warping and bending moment in the design phase and assists to understand the effect of warping reduction through partial heating during plastic bending. With increasing temperature of the heated profile area, the warping is reduced up to 76% and the springback of the bend profiles is decreased up to 44%. The warping reduction is attributed to a shift in stress free fiber due to the temperature gradient between heated and room temperature areas. The shift of stress-free fiber leads to an adapted shear center position, resulting in an approximated “quasi-symmetric” bending case.