These slides were presented at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

Simulation and physical testing are often considered as alternative approaches for investigating novel manufacturing processes, but using them in combination can be powerful and cost-effective when developing, adjusting or debugging a joining application procedure. In this paper, investigations into thermal joining processing are described in which thermo-mechanical manufacturing process finite element simulations have been used to enhance the value of experimental investigations and to reduce the time and cost to understand the technique and its outputs. Solid-state processes can be used for joining similar or dissimilar materials, which are often metals, and these processes generally operate at elevated temperatures and under very high pressures; they can have a number of other process parameters too. These processes are often hidden inside protective vacuum or inert atmospheres and/or safety enabling enclosures, and the processing environment can make monitoring techniques challenging or even impossible, making it difficult to measure the actual loads and other process parameters during experiments, and to quantitatively or qualitatively assess the effect of varying those process parameters. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has been found to be very useful in addressing this problem by using simulations to '˜look inside'™ the equipment during the operation to aid visualisation and technical understanding. Rather than attempting to model atomic scale joint formation, a pragmatic approach has been adopted in which simplified finite element models of the process and testing arrangement have been developed to simulate the behaviour of the setup and work piece material during processing. These models have been applied to compute the relevant process parameters, and in this way, the observed results can be related to the material behaviour, allowing the tests to be better interpreted without the need for extensive further practical experiments. This hybrid modelling-testing approach has proved to be very promising, saving time and cost when developing and applying advanced manufacturing processes.