Revisiting tin melting for phase change model verification

Abstract

Model verification is necessary before numerical models can be applied to produce meaningful results. For solid-liquid phase change modelling involving convection, pure gallium and tin melting have been widely used as reference for verification. It was later found that contrasting observations have been reported on the flow structure of both metals in the liquid region during the phase change process. Some researchers have reported monocellular while others reported multicellular structures in past works. In this work, tin melting problem was revisited by extending the results to flow structure visualization with Line Integral Convolution (LIC) plots to confirm the flow structure for tin melting thus pure metals in general. Enthalpy-porosity formulation coupled with Finite-Volume Method (FVM) was used to solve the set of governing equations which represented the problem at Prandtl Number = 0.02, Stefan Number = 0.01 and Rayleigh Number = 2.5 x 105. The location of solid-liquid interface and LIC plots at different times were presented. At initial state, the solid-liquid interface was closely similar for all grid sizes but as time progresses, finer grids provided improved solutions as expected. Reasonable fine grid size must be selected for solid-liquid phase change models to ensure complete physics of the problems are captured and eventually yield acceptable numerical results. The LIC plots confirmed that the flow structure is multicellular. Future phase change models referring to pure metal melting problem for verification should obtain similar flow structure to be considered acceptable.