Numerical Computation of Moving Boundary Phenomena

Zerroukat, Mohamed (1993) Numerical Computation of Moving Boundary Phenomena. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

When matter is subjected to a gradient of: temperature, pressure, concentration, voltage or chemical potential a phase change may occur, which for dynamic processes will be separated by moving boundaries between the adjacent phases. Transport properties vary considerably between phases, consequently any change in phase modifies the rate of transport of: energy, momentum, charge or matter which are fundamental to the behaviour of many physical systems. Such dynamic multi-phase problems have, for historical and mathematical reasons, become known as either: Stefan problems or Moving Boundary Problems (MBPs). In most engineering applications the analysis of these problems is often impossible without recourse to numerical schemes which utilise either: finite difference or finite element methods. The success of finite element methods is their ability to handle complex geometries; however, they are time consuming and less amenable to vectorisation than finite difference techniques which, because of their greater simplicity in formulation and programming, continue to be the more popular choice. Several finite difference schemes are available for the solution of moving boundary problems; however, there are some difficulties associated with each method. Each time a new numerical scheme is developed, it has the aim of improving either, or both, the accuracy and the computational performance. For solving one-dimensional moving boundary problems, the variable time step grid is the best approach in terms of simplicity and computational efficiency. Due to the fact that the time step is variable the implicit recurrence formulae, which are stable for any mesh size, have always been used with this type of discretisation of the space time domain. It will be shown in the course of this thesis that the implicit methods are very inaccurate when used with relatively large time steps; hence, the immediate conclusion may be made - that implicit variable time step methods may not be sufficiently accurate to solve moving boundary problems where the boundary is moving with a relatively slow velocity. The proposed idea, of combining real and virtual grid networks and using new explicit finite difference equations, eliminates the loss of accuracy associated with implicit methods, when the time step is large, and offers higher computational performance. The new finite difference equations are based on the approach of making the finite difference substitution into the solution of the partial differential equation rather than into the partial differential equation itself, which is the classical approach. A new numerical scheme for two-phase Stefan problems which will be referred to as the EVTS method is developed and the solution is compared to other numerical methods as well as the analytic solution. Furthermore, the EVTS method is modified to solve implicit moving boundary problems (oxygen diffusion problem), in which an explicit relation containing the velocity of the moving boundary is absent. The resulting method achieves similar results to other more complex and time consuming methods. A further numerical scheme referred to as the ZC method is developed to deal with heat transfer problems involving three phases (or 2 moving boundaries) which appear and disappear during the process. To the knowledge of the author, a finite difference method for such a problem does not exist. For validation, numerical results are compared with those of the conservative finite element method of Bonnerot and Jamet, which is the only other method available to solve two-moving boundary problems. Finally, a new finite difference solution for non-linear problems is developed and applied to laser heat treatment of materials. The numerical results are in good agreement with published experimental results.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Additional Information: Adviser: C R Chatwin
• Keywords: Mechanical engineering
• Date of Award: 1993
• Depositing User: Enlighten Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:1993-75461
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 19 Nov 2019 20:02
• Last Modified: 19 Nov 2019 20:02
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/75461