Thermomechanical Modeling of Cylindrical Laser Cladding and the Influence of Model Reduction Methods on Numerical Agreement

Laser cladding is widely used for surface modification and repair of cylindrical components, but detailed thermo- mechanical simulations incur substantial computational costs because of the moving heat source, repeated thermal cycles, and nonlinear structural response. This study compares several numerical reduction approaches for cylindrical laser cladding, including Temporal Lumping, sequential thermal?structural analysis with reduced structural steps, and Modified Inherent Strain (MIS) models.</br>The thermal comparison showed that increasing the temporal discretization interval reduced the peak temperature and altered the high-temperature region, although these thermal responses did not change at the same rate. The transient reduced models generally preserved the overall residual-stress distribution along the common helical path, while larger differences were observed at localized coating and interface regions. For the MIS models, including substrate inherent strain substantially increased the substrate-side stress response and reduced the underestimation of the hoop stress, whereas the one-dimensional spatial representation did not consistently provide better agreement than the volume-averaged representation.</br>Under the same computational environment, Temporal Lumping reduced the computation time by a factor of 2.50 relative to the Numerical Reference model. The results show that numerical reduction methods should be evaluated not only by computational cost but also by the location- and component-dependent agreement of residual-stress distributions.