Monolithic simulation of convection-coupled phase-change - verification and reproducibility

TL;DR

This paper introduces Phaseflow, an open-source simulation tool for convection-coupled phase change, emphasizing verification, reproducibility, and flexible mesh adaptivity in modeling melting and solidification processes.

Contribution

It presents a novel, flexible implementation of a monolithic finite element method for phase change with convection, integrated into the FEniCS platform, and demonstrates reproducibility with Docker.

Findings

Successfully simulated classical benchmarks like the Stefan problem.

Achieved preliminary 3D convection-coupled melting results.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of goal-oriented adaptive mesh refinement.

Abstract

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.