Modeling of dendritic solidification and numerical analysis of the phase-field approach to model complex morphologies in alloys

Dendrites are one of the most widely observed patterns in nature, and occur across a wide spectrum of physical phenomena—from snow flakes to river basins; from bacterial colonies to lungs and vascular systems; and in solidification and growth patterns in metals and crystals. The ubiquitous occurrence of these “tree-like” structures can be attributed to their excellent space-filling properties, and at times, dendritic structures also spatially manifest fractal-like distributions. As is the case with many fractal-like geometries, the complex multi-level branching structures in dendrites pose a modeling challenge, and a full resolution of dendritic structures is computationally very demanding. In the literature, extensive theoretical models of dendritic formation and evolution, essentially as extensions of the classical moving boundary Stefan problem exist. Much of this understanding is from the analysis of dendrites occurring during the solidification of metallic alloys, as this is critical for understanding microstructure evolution during metal manufacturing processes that involve solidification of a liquid melt. Motivated by the problem of modeling microstructure evolution from liquid melts of pure metals and metallic alloys during metal additive manufacturing, we developed a comprehensive numerical framework for modeling a large variety of dendritic structures that are relevant to metal solidification. In this work, we present a numerical framework encompassing the modeling of Stefan problem formulations relevant to dendritic evolution using a phase-field approach and a finite element method implementation. Using this framework, we model numerous complex dendritic morphologies that are physically relevant to the solidification of pure melts and binary alloys. The distinguishing aspects of this work are—a unified treatment of both pure metals and alloys; novel numerical error estimates of dendritic tip velocity; and the study of error convergence of the primal fields of temperature and the order parameter with respect to numerical discretization. To the best of our knowledge, this is a first of its kind study of numerical convergence of the phase-field equations of dendritic growth in a finite element method setting. Further, using this numerical framework, various types of physically relevant dendritic solidification patterns like single equiaxed, multi-equiaxed, single columnar and multi-columnar dendrites are modeled in two-dimensional and three-dimensional computational domains.