A 3D parallel simulator for crystal growth and solidification in complex alloy systems

A 3D parallel simulator is developed to numerically solve the evolution equations of a new non-isothermal phase-field model for crystal growth and solidification in complex alloy systems. The new model and the simulator are capable to simultaneously describe the diffusion processes of multiple components, the phase transitions between multiple phases and the development of the temperature field. Weak and facetted formulations of both, surface energy and kinetic anisotropies are incorporated in the phase-field model. Multicomponent bulk diffusion effects including interdiffusion coefficients as well as diffusion in the interfacial region of phase or grain boundaries are considered. We introduce our parallel simulator that is based on a finite difference discretization including effective adaptive strategies and multigrid methods to reduce computation time and memory usage. The parallelization is realized for distributed as well as shared memory computer architectures using MPI libraries and OpenMP concepts. Applying the new computer model, we present a variety of simulated crystal structures such as dendrites, grains, binary and ternary eutectics in 2D and 3D. The influence of anisotropy on the microstructure evolution shows the formation of facets in preferred crystallographic directions. Phase transformations and solidification processes in a real multi-component alloy can be described by incorporating the physical data (e.g. surface tensions, kinetic coefficients, specific heat, heat and mass diffusion coefficients) and the specific phase diagram (in particular latent heats and melting temperatures) into the diffuse interface model via the free energies.