AN ENTHALPY CONTROL-VOLUME UNSTRUCTURED-MESH (CV-UM) ALGORITHM FOR SOLIDIFICATION BY CONDUCTION ONLY

Recently, control volume methods have been developed for fluid flow and heat transfer on unstructured meshes. This approach has been extended here to implement the enthalpy based solidification algorithm on an unstructured mesh. A range of two-dimensional test problems are solved using triangular and quadrilateral cells (or elements). The accuracy of the CV-UM algorithms compare favourably with the structured-mesh algorithm, though the former algorithms require 1.5-3 times as much CPU as the latter. This overhead is associated with the extra work caused by the unstructuredness of the mesh; the number of sweeps to achieve convergence is roughly comparable for all algorithms. The CV-UM algorithms should perform well on complex geometry problems and, therefore, show potential to be a productive technique in casting solidification analysis.