NUMERICAL-SIMULATION OF AXISYMMETRICAL VISCOUS SINTERING

In this paper we describe a numerical method to simulate particular axisymmetric viscous sintering problems. In these problems the material transport is modelled as a viscous incompressible Newtonian volume flow driven solely by surface tension. The numerical simulation is carried out by solving the governing Stokes equations for a fixed domain through a boundary element method (BEM). The resulting velocity field then determines an approximate geometry at a next time level by employing a variable step, variable order backward differences formulae (BDF) method. This numerical algorithm is demonstrated for several simply connected sintering domains, including two coalescing spheres. Furthermore, by considering the movement of a particular fluid region, some discrepancies between modelling it as a two-dimensional fluid and as an axisymmetric problem are demonstrated.