Viscoplastic response and collapse of 316L stainless steel tubes under cyclic bending

This paper presents the experimental and theoretical results of the viscoplastic response and collapse of 316L stainless steel tubes subjected to cyclic bending. The tube bending machine and curvature-ovalization measurement apparatus, which was designed by Pan et al. (1998), were used for conducting the cyclic curvature-controlled experiment. Three different curvature-rates were controlled to highlight the characteristic of viscoplastic response and collapse. Next, the endochronic theory and the principle of virtual work were used to simulate the viscoplastic response of 316L stainless steel tubes under cyclic bending. In addition, a proposed theoretical formulation (Lee and Pan 2001) was used to simulate the relationship between the controlled cyclic curvature and the number of cycles to produce buckling under cyclic bending at different curvature-rates (viscoplastic collapse). It has been shown that the theoretical simulations of the response and collapse correlate well with the experimental data.