Three dimensional thermal-solute phase field simulation of binary alloy solidification

We employ adaptive mesh refinement, implicit time stepping, a nonlinear multigrid solver and parallel computation to solve a multi-scale, time dependent, three dimensional, nonlinear set of coupled partial differential equations for three scalar field variables. The mathematical model represents the non-isothermal solidification of a metal alloy into a melt substantially cooled below its freezing point at the microscale. Underlying physical molecular forces are captured at this scale by a specification of the energy field. The time rate of change of the temperature, alloy concentration and an order parameter to govern the state of the material (liquid or solid) are controlled by the diffusion parameters and variational derivatives of the energy functional. The physical problem is important to material scientists for the development of solid metal alloys and, hitherto, this fully coupled thermal problem has not been simulated in three dimensions, due to its computationally demanding nature. By bringing together state of the art numerical techniques this problem is now shown here to be tractable at appropriate resolution with relatively moderate computational resources.