Abstract Three roll push bending allow to manufacture bent profiles used for structural or piping purposes in several industrial fields such as aerospace, automotive, energy and chemical. When thin-walled tubes are formed with small bending radii, the components may suffer of wrinkling at the intrados due to the critical compressive stress state induced by the deformation. Poor tuning of the bending parameters, tool wear, scatter of the tubes diameter and mechanical properties, erroneous positioning of the longitudinal seam weld compared to the bending plane can make it impossible to achieve the required accuracy and, more in general, the proper control of the process. The paper aims at proving the suitability of dynamic analysis techniques to detect the defects due to the instability of the tube sections during the process. The approach was applied to different industrial processing conditions and the results are compared and discussed. The proposed approach appears promising for the detection of wrinkling, once they appear on the tube, and capable to give accurate feedback for the real-time adjustment of the process parameters.