A fully implicit, fully adaptive time and space discretisation method for phase-field simulation of binary alloy solidification

A fully-implicit numerical method based upon adaptively refined meshes for the simulation of binary alloy solidification in 2D is presented. In addition we combine a second-order fully-implicit time discretisation scheme with variable steps size control to obtain an adaptive time and space discretisation method. The superiority of this method, compared to widely used fully-explicit methods, with respect to CPU time and accuracy, is shown. Due to the high non-linearity of the governing equations a robust and fast solver for systems of nonlinear algebraic equations is needed to solve the intermediate approximations per time step. We use a nonlinear multigrid solver which shows almost h-independent convergence behaviour.