A modified truncation error-based adaptive time-step control strategy for fully- and semi-implicit simulation of isothermal solidification processes

When analyzing the transient characteristics of solidification processes, choosing appropriately-sized time steps is difficult. Accordingly, the current study develops a modified local time truncation error (LTE)-based strategy designed to adaptively adjust the size of the time step during the simulated solidification procedure in such a way that the time steps can be adapted in accordance with the local variations in latent heat released during phase change or the effects of pure conduction in a single solid or liquid phase. In the approach presented in this work, the LTE-based time-step evaluation procedure is applied not only after a convergent temperature field is obtained at each time step, but also during the nonlinear iterations performed at each time step whenever a convergence problem is encountered. The computational accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are demonstrated via the simulation of the one-dimensional and two-dimensional solidification problems and compared with those of other adaptive time step and the uniform time step methods. Furthermore, the performance of these approaches has also been demonstrated using fully-implicit and semi-implicit schemes.