A novel stand alone bend testing device is used to determine elastic and plastic parameters of sheet metals.This method is applied where uni-axial tensile tests cannot be used to take into account the gradients of material properties throughout the thickness of the sheet metals.The ease of use makes the device particularly interesting in an industrial environment.Not only new materials with unknown parameters can be tested,it can be also used for the quality control of different lots of the same material.The quality of prediction,for example of the spring back,in a metal forming simulation is improved using the identification results.The influence of the simulation model with respect to the identification results is analyzed.