Tube and pipe bending details in industrial production

Tube bending is the classic process in the manufacturing industry and is connected to many various applications or units from simple tubing in water lines, and heating lines to complicated connections in the aerospace and shipbuilding industry. Some bending tubing is already the final part such as street rails, bike parking tubes, transport rails, handles for furniture or garden equipment, and many else. Moreover complicated tube bending is an effective way to optimize the production because preparation of parts with future welding request additional processes and workers.

Classical draw tube deformation and bending is a process that is known for more than 50 years with no big differences and advantages than it was before. Anyway, the digital industry affects the possibility to install new PLC/CNC controls into new machines, and more precision servomotors to make the production equipment much more precise for the work and positioning of the tube together with perfect tolerances in the final part. The present digital composition also helps to reduce the qualification and skills for workers to work in tube bending production shops without missing the quality of the part. Moreover, digitization has brought new advantages - tests of complete tubing even with very complicated geometries for complete passing, positioning, bending, and absence of collisions before the tryout of the real tube. This helps a lot to prepare the correct programs, and technological process, develop proper tube bending tools, and much more.

Precision tube bending is used a lot in sensitive applications like the automotive sector, aerospace and rocketry, production of premium furniture, and mainly - hydraulic plants. Hydraulic equipment is one of the most important sectors - it requested high-pressure tube lines, complicated geometries, and ideal quality because any deformation and cracking can lead to damage to the line. Sometimes we encountered applications we didn't even think about before like window profiles for boats completely made with CNC tube bending machines. Anyway, the hydraulic and automotive sectors are the main ones because requested precision, tolerances, quality, and together the production of the parts in big quantities. High production volume is only one booster for the development of additional automation in tube bending to make the cycled completely automated process with the use of robots or automatic transferring devices, grippers, storages, transporters, etc. An automated line for tube bending and, for example, end forming and assembling is the real "state of the art" which probably requested a big investment but performs the big production with the final required parts.

There are a lot of small specialties for tube bending which are important only for your parts, for example clamping area and the possibility of scratches, minimizing straight parts, bend-in-bend technic, bending of small and big radiuses on one machine, bending with end-formings or other elements, bending of hard materials and many more. It is important to say that there is also no universal tube bending tooling for classic tube bending machines - it is completely individual which means that it is done for your tube, material, the radius of bending, and possible geometry. Tube bending is also a special production process for precision and tolerance - each bend can enlarge differences and that is why the final tube is used not just classic measurements for verification but special gauges to check the complete tube line, ends, and the impossibility to touch other elements if they are planned to install.

The tube bending machines market is also very and very variable, the machine can cost from 20 000 EUR for simple 1-axis configuration and small diameters to 1 million EUR for large diameters. Big tube diameters are widely used in the production of trucks or other big construction equipment and machines, shipbuilding, and chemical or energy industries. And you can imagine that no one can handle or move the tube with 200-300 mm so the positioning and moving should be made automatically. In the big diameters (or also big thicknesses) there are used also 2 main tube bending processes - classic cold tube bending and induction bending which means the heating of the tube during the deformation. Processes are competitive and each has advantages and disadvantages based on the final application.

In the end - the automatic tube bending process is an incredible process just to watch even if you are far away from the production industry and mainly free-form bending with modern machines. It is quite nice to see how the parts are made and you never considered that it is so.

Precitools is a professional Italian industrial supplier of sheet metal and tube deformation production solutions including tooling and equipment