Air bending and springback of stainless steel clad aluminum sheet

This paper deals with bending and springback phenomena of a stainless-steel clad aluminum sheet in V-shaped air bending. The aim of this study is to investigate the bending characteristics such as sheet thickness change and the bending angles of the sheet before/after springback. The first part of this paper is on the experimental observations. V-bending experiments were performed for both the cases of Alin/SSout (i.e., aluminum layer is located inside the bent clad) and SSin/Alout (i.e., stainless-steel layer is located inside the bent clad). From these results, it was found that the sheet-set condition (either Alin/SSout or SSin/Alout) has a great influence on the bending phenomena. In the second part, the accurate prediction of springback by FE analysis, especially the role of elasto-plasticity models, is discussed. When using Yoshida–Uemori kinematic hardening model (F. Yoshida, T. Uemori, Int. J. Plasticity 18, 2002; Int. J. Mech. Sci., 45, 2003), which well describes the Bauschinger effect of materials, the springback of the clad sheet is accurately calculated, whereas the classical isotropic hardening model underestimates the springback.