An adaptive mesh method for phase-field simulation of alloy solidification in three dimensions

We present our computational method for binary alloy solidification which takes advantage of high performance computing where up to 1024 cores are employed. Much of the simulation at a sufficiently fine resolution is possible on a modern 12 core PC and the 1024 core simulation is only necessary for very mature dendrite and convergence testing where high resolution puts extreme demands on memory. In outline, the method uses implicit time stepping in conjunction with an iterative solver, adaptive meshing and a scheme for dividing the work load across processors. We include three dimensional results for a Lewis number of 100 and a snapshot for a mature dendrite for a Lewis number of 40 .