Development of a Para-AMR algorithm for simulating dendrite growth under convection using a phase-field-lattice Boltzmann method

By combining adaptive mesh refinement and parallel computing, a high performance numerical algorithm was developed to simulate dendrite growth against convection using a phase-field-lattice Boltzmann method. Numerical tests on both 2-D and 3-D dendrite growth cases revealed that, by employing moderate amount of computing resources (101-102 parallel processes), this algorithm, without compromising any accuracy, could improve the computational efficiency by 2-3 orders of magnitude, or for most cases shorten the overall elapsed simulation time by 95%, comparing with the normally applied explicit algorithm. Besides, the computational stability or convergence of the algorithm could be maintained even when the local volume fraction of solid approached ∼100%, which could not be achieved if other implicit algorithms like SIMPLE was employed.