Electrical–Thermal–Mechanical Analysis of Focused Infrared Heating Process

Demand of infrared (IR) heating technology has been increasing in industrial heat treatment processes to replace traditional heating methods because of this technology’s high energy efficiency. However, numerical analyses of IR heating have not been sufficiently reported. This work proposes a framework for electrical–thermal–mechanical analysis of a focused IR heating process using multi-physics analysis to obtain more information about the physical phenomenon. In the present model, the electrical-thermal analysis simulated the IR lamp converting electrical energy to infrared radiation, then the radiation heating and mechanical analyses of the target material was conducted. The temperature of the IR lamp in the simulation was 2357 °C (around 2600 K), which matches the well-known range of the temperatures (2500–3000 K) of IR lamps. For the radiation heating analysis, four simple models were proposed, based on geometrical-feature, to consider the distribution of IR radiation. With the present model, focused IR heating for a metal sheet was simulated and the results were compared to the experimental data. The normalized root mean square errors (RMSEs) of all of the proposed models were less than 10% for the central temperature, which is the most important heating position of the focused IR heating. The results show that the electrical–thermal–mechanical model provides good agreement with the measured data in predicting local heating effect of saving heating energy. In addition, this multi-physics simulation can provide information on the thermal expansion and stress distribution as well as the temperature field of the heated material.