Effect of Prandtl Number on Solidification Behavior of Eutectic Solutions

This article investigates the effect of Prandtl number on solidification bahaviour in a top-cooled rectangular cavity considering eutectic compositions of four different binary solutions. Nondimensional analysis is carried out to represent all the systems in a general form. The numerical model used for the simulation follows a fixed-grid and single-domain approach. Accordingly, the solidification process is described by the governing equations of conservation of mass, momentum and energy. The equations are solved by pressure based semi-implicit finite volume method, according to the SIMPLER algorithm, using line-by-line TDMA solver. The present work finds that the variation of nondimensional heat flux and nondimensional average solid-layer height with nondimensional time is more or less same for systems having almost equal Prandtl number. For system having higher Prandtl number, it is observed that the nondimensional average solid -layer height is significantly low and the occurrence of remelting appears.