Electrically operated high temperature furnaces and reactors are used in many industrial manufacturing processes such as sintering or single crystal growth in order to allow for the required process conditions. In view of their outstanding characteristics refractory metals are ideally suited as materials for the resistive heating elements. Nevertheless, significant and lifetime-limiting irreversible deformations of these elements can be frequently observed which are assumed to be caused by a combination of temperature expansion, electromagnetic forces, and high temperature creep effects. In order to study this undesired behavior, a multi-physics model of a particular three-phase AC heating element of a sintering furnace is formulated and implemented within Abaqus.
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