A review on the application of lattice Boltzmann method for melting and solidification problems

Abstract

Melting and solidification of pure metals and alloys are important research areas due to their practical applications, where the study of dynamic evolution of the interface offers a challenging task to the researchers. For the last two decades, lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) has been extensively used to model transport phenomena involving complex boundary at the phase interface for pure metals and alloys because of high computational efficiency and cost effectiveness of LBM. A state-of-art survey on application of LBM for melting and solidification phenomena is now presented in this work. This paper, first introduces the theory of thermal lattice Boltzmann method (TLBM) for heat and fluid flow, subsequently an elaborate coverage is presented on the methodologies used to study the melting-solidification phenomena of pure substances and alloy materials. The success of lattice Boltzmann (LB) method in investigating the morphological structure during solidification is specially emphasized. It is observed in this context that the phase field method (PFM) has evolved as the most popular choice for evaluating the microstructure. While the robustness of LBM can effectively handle the fluid flow calculation around the dendrites, phase field based lattice Boltzmann method (PFLBM) is very effective in simulating the growth of dendrites from the seed level to the very large scale. The realistic morphological structure can be accurately predicted due to the computational efficacy of PFLBM. A comprehensive coverage has been provided on application of PFLBM method in simulating the growth kinetics in alloys. Further, the application of the PFLBM in solidification has been showcased from open literature.