Theoretical and experimental investigation on influence of load control strategy of LY12 duralumin alloy bar fine cropping process

•A new near net bar cropping method and the corresponding system are introduced.•Five different types of the loading cycles are designed.•A load control strategy with a suitable ΔK is applied to the cropping process.•A new cropped billet’s cross-section quality evaluation method is proposed.•Section quality and Cropping time are greatly influenced by the cropping load.