Melting and flowing in multiphase environment

This paper presents a method to simulate the melting and flowing phenomena with different materials in multiple phases. In such a multiphase environment, solid objects are melted because of heating and the melted liquid flows while interacting with the ambient air flow. Our simulation is based on a modified lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), where the fluid dynamics of the air flow and the melted liquid is modeled within a common lattice framework. Therefore, no particular front tracking methods are required for the liquid–air interface. The liquid–solid and air–solid interfaces are implemented as curved boundaries in the LBM, which can accommodate arbitrarily shaped solid objects. Heat transfer is incorporated with a finite difference discretization of a standard diffusion–advection equation simulating the temperature evolution. The temperature and body forces (gravity and surface tension) are easily applied by adopting a new version of the LBM: multiple-relaxation-time LBM (MRTLBM). The melting and flowing behavior is controlled by the heat source, the viscosity and the body forces. All the numerical computations in our method are local and parallelizable, therefore, interactive speed is achieved by hardware acceleration on the contemporary graphics hardware (GPU).