Currently requirements of thin-walled tube with small bending radius cause the defects such as wrinkling,overthinning and cross-section distortion more prone to occur in bending process. Based on the analysis of the forming characteristics by analytical and experimental methods,a complete 3D elastic-plastic FEM model of the process was developed using ABAQUS/Explicit code,including bending process,balls retracting and unloading process,and thus the plastic deformation characteristics with small bending radius were investigated. The main results show that: 1) The utmost deformation feature of the NC bending process is its continuous progressive deformation. 2) The occurring conditions of the defects such as wrinkling and tension instability in the process are obtained. The wrinkling is traditional on the double compressive stresses state and the tension instability is on the double tension stresses state. 3) The enhanced non-uniform deformation in thin-walled tube with small bending radius is demonstrated by comparing the stress/ strains distributions under the 1.5D and 1D bending conditions. 4) For 1D small bending process,a new method-"stepped mandrel retraction" is proposed to improve the bending quality in experiment according to the FE simulation. The simulation results are verified by experiment.