Advanced numerical methods for the simulation of alloy solidification with high Lewis number

Abstract

A fully-implicit numerical method based upon adaptively refined meshes for the thermal-solutal simulation of alloy solidification in 2D is presented. In addition we combine an unconditional stable second-order fully-implicit time discretisation scheme with variable step size control to obtain an adaptive time and space discretisation method, where a robust and fast multigrid solver for systems of non-linear algebraic equations is used to solve the intermediate approximations per time step. For the isothermal case, the superiority of this method, compared to widely used fully-explicit methods, with respect to CPU time and accuracy, has been demonstrated and published previously. Here, the new proposed method has been applied to the thermalsolutal case with high Lewis number, where stability issues and time step restrictions have been major constraints in previous research.