Flow/Thermal modeling and analysis of solidification processes with stabilization and adaptive time stepping features

In the present study, for applications to solidification processes involving phase change and influenced by convection effects, stabilized finite element formulations are employed in conjunction with the enthalpy method which handles the latent heat release, a fixed-grid finite element technique for providing simplicity in the computations, and an adaptive time stepping strategy which employs the norm of the dependent variable differences between adjacent time step levels to control the error and for accurately tracking the phase fronts with optimal effort. Numerical examples are provided for phase change problems influenced by convection effects.