1 research outputs found
Monolithic simulation of convection-coupled phase-change - verification and reproducibility
Phase interfaces in melting and solidification processes are strongly
affected by the presence of convection in the liquid. One way of modeling their
transient evolution is to couple an incompressible flow model to an energy
balance in enthalpy formulation. Two strong nonlinearities arise, which account
for the viscosity variation between phases and the latent heat of fusion at the
phase interface.
The resulting coupled system of PDE's can be solved by a single-domain
semi-phase-field, variable viscosity, finite element method with monolithic
system coupling and global Newton linearization. A robust computational model
for realistic phase-change regimes furthermore requires a flexible
implementation based on sophisticated mesh adaptivity. In this article, we
present first steps towards implementing such a computational model into a
simulation tool which we call Phaseflow.
Phaseflow utilizes the finite element software FEniCS, which includes a
dual-weighted residual method for goal-oriented adaptive mesh refinement.
Phaseflow is an open-source, dimension-independent implementation that, upon an
appropriate parameter choice, reduces to classical benchmark situations
including the lid-driven cavity and the Stefan problem. We present and discuss
numerical results for these, an octadecane PCM convection-coupled melting
benchmark, and a preliminary 3D convection-coupled melting example,
demonstrating the flexible implementation. Though being preliminary, the latter
is, to our knowledge, the first published 3D result for this method. In our
work, we especially emphasize reproducibility and provide an easy-to-use
portable software container using Docker.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure