The possibility of accurately identifying thermal material parameters on the basis of a simple tension test is presented, using a parameter identification framework for thermo-mechanically coupled material models on the basis of full field displacement and temperature field measurements. Main objective is to show the impact of the material model formulation on the results of such an identification with respect to accuracy and uniqueness of the result. To do so, and as a proof of concept, the data of two different experiments is used. One experiment including cooling of the specimen, due to ambient temperature, and one without specimen cooling. The main constitutive relations of two basic material models are summarised (associated and non-associated plasticity), whereas both models are extended so as to introduce an additional material parameter for the thermodynamically consistent scaling of dissipated energy. The chosen models are subjected to two parameter identifications each, using the data of either experiment and focusing on the determination of thermal material parameters. The influence of the predicted dissipated energy of the models on the identification process is investigated showing that a specific material model formulation must be chosen carefully. The material model with associated evolution equations used within this work does neither allow a unique identification result, nor is any of the solutions for the underlying material parameters close to literature values. In contrast to that, a stable, that is locally unique, re-identification of the literature values is possible for the boundary problem at hand if the model with non-associated evolution equation is used and if cooling is included in the experimental data.
