Abstract: Powder-based manufacturing, combined with additive manufacturing techniques, has enabled the production of advanced composites and complex geometries with tailored mechanical and thermal properties. These methods minimize machining and material waste, offering significant benefits for applications in nuclear energy and aerospace. However, post-processing steps — such as sintering, pyrolysis and reactive infiltration — often introduce variability in the final part properties, which remains a critical bottleneck to mainstream adoption of powder processing techniques.
Powder Utilization Modeling Application (PUMA) is a scalable, open-source tool designed to simulate powder post-processing. PUMA enables manufacturers to predict distortion, residual stress and, for reactive processes, the reaction completion fraction of complex parts subjected to sintering, curing, pyrolysis, infiltration and single-phase solidification. These metrics are essential for optimizing manufacturing workflows to yield dense, stable components.
PUMA is built on the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework, sponsored by the Office of Nuclear Energy, and integrates NEML2, a GPU-accelerated constitutive model library. The tool includes four modular sub-models — sintering, curing/pyrolysis, infiltration and solidification — which can be chained to simulate complete post-processing pipelines.