Springback angle prediction of circular metal tube considering the interference of cross-sectional distortion in mandrel-less rotary draw bending

The springback directly affects the forming accuracy and quality of metal bent-tube, and accurate springback prediction is the key to the springback compensation and control. This paper investigates the springback of mandrel-less rotary draw bending (MLRDB) of circular metal tubes, and an innovative method, springback angle prediction considering the interference of cross-sectional distortion (IoCSD-SAP), is proposed. The digit decomposition condition variational auto-encoder generative adversarial network (D2CVAE-GAN) is developed to augment the data samples. Considering the nonlinear interference of the cross-sectional distortion on springback, auxiliary extended radial basis function (AE-RBF) is proposed. It establishes the mapping relationship between the characteristic parameters and cross-sectional distortion. By extracting the information encode of cross-sectional distortion as the condition input, this model realizes the condition prediction of springback angle. Taking MLRDB of 6060-T6 Al-alloy circular tube as a case study, the proposed method, IoCSD-SAP, is verified. According to the experimental results, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) for the springback angle of our proposed method is 4.73%, and three different analytical models are 38.92%, 14.39%, and 14.22%, respectively. It can be seen that our proposed method significantly improves the prediction accuracy of springback angle. For the springback angle prediction of circular metal tube in MLRDB, the data augmentation can effectively reduce the generalization error and improve the prediction accuracy. The nonlinear interference of the cross-sectional distortion on springback should be taken into account to improve the accuracy and robustness of the springback prediction model.