Experimental and numerical study of springback in V‐die bending of copper sheets

In sheet metal forming, springback is defined as the difference between the desired shape and the final one obtained after the removal of the tooling. We first carried out an experimental study on different thicknesses of copper sheets bent in a V‐die. From these experiments we plotted the evolution of the punch force as function of displacement and measured the final bent angle from which springback was derived. We then conducted a numerical study in which the simulations have been conducted using the commercial finite elements code LS‐DYNA. Finally we compared the springback predictions with the experimental results and we discussed the effects of material’s constitutive law and the methods used to compute the elastic recovery.