CMN 2026

Thermomechanical Simulations of Additive Manufacturing Proceses with Temperature-Dependent Material Properties

  • Kaleem, Muhammad Ahsan (IMDEA Materials Institute)
  • Rossi, Nestor (IMDEA Materials Institute)
  • Romero, Ignacio (IMDEA Materials Institute)

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Complex thermomechanical interactions govern thermally driven additive manufacturing processes and predominantly determine the mechanical properties and quality of the final product. These processes involve large temperature variations, which lead to significant changes in material properties. For simplicity, such temperature-dependent variations are often neglected, introducing considerable modeling errors. Several attempts have been made to incorporate temperature-dependent behavior for all or a subset of material properties [1][2]. In addition, thermomechanical solutions formulated under large-deformation assumptions have been explored [3]; however, such approaches are computationally expensive. Moreover, many existing studies either assume weak thermomechanical coupling or employ staggered solution strategies for strongly coupled systems, resulting in conditionally stable numerical solutions [4][5]. In this work, a strongly coupled thermomechanical system is solved using a monolithic approach for additive manufacturing processes, accounting for the temperature dependence of all material properties. A general small-strain thermomechanical framework applicable to arbitrary temperature-dependent elastic or inelastic constitutive models was formulated and implemented in the MUESLI material library. The formulation was verified against benchmark problems and subsequently applied to simulations of different additive manufacturing processes with IRIS, a finite element code. The results yield physically consistent temperature, stress, and displacement fields that agree with trends reported in the literature. It is concluded that temperature-dependent material properties significantly influence the thermomechanical response and that a strongly coupled monolithic solution provides a robust and stable alternative to commonly used splitting-based strategies. REFERENCES [1] D.-R. Riedlbauer, P. Steinmann, and J. Mergheim, Thermomechanical finite element simulations of selective electron beam melting processes: Performance considerations, Computational Mechanics, vol. 54, pp. 109–122, 2014. [2] C. Burkhardt, P. Steinmann, and J. Mergheim, Thermo-mechanical simulations of powder bed fusion processes: Accuracy and efficiency, Adv. Model. Simul. Eng. Sci., vol. 9, 18, 2022. [3] Hodge, N.E., Ferencz, R.M. & Solberg, J.M. Implementation of a thermomechanical model for the simulation of selective laser melting. Comput Mech 54, 33–51 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00466-