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 step 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 nonlinearity 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. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.