Towards an assistance system for free-form tube bending

This paper describes an approach to the development of a standardized methodology for the free-form bending of tubes. Starting from a customer inquiry, it is shown how to quickly check feasibility, determine process parameters, create the tool path for the bending machine and finally check the geometry of the manufactured parts. A software tool created to assist in the different stages of this procedure will also be discussed. The second part of the paper describes some bending experiments that were carried out to validate this approach.