Tutorial: Growth of a 2D crystal

This tutorial describes how to pre-process, run and post-process a simple crystal growth case with phaseFieldFoam.

Pre-processing

Change to the case directory.

$ cd phaseFieldFoam/tutorials/multiphase/phaseFieldFoam/phase

Mesh generation

Generate the mesh in the case directory using blockMesh.

$ blockMesh

Boundary and initial conditions

The boundary conditions are in the 0 folder.

$ less 0/fi.orig
$ less 0/dT

Initialize the fields.

$ setFields

Physical properties

The physical properties are prescribed in the constant/physicalProperties dictionary file.

Example usage:

DT              DT     [0 2 -1 0 0 0 0] 2.25;
tau             tau    [0 0  1 0 0 0 0] 3e-04;
alpha           alpha  [0 1  0 0 0 0 0] 0.015;
c               c      [0 0  0 0 0 0 0] 0.02;
N               N      [0 0  0 0 0 0 0] 6;

Other properties are also prescribed in the constant/fvModels dictionary file.

Example usage:

anisotropy
{
    type           anisotropySource;
    active         yes;

    anisotropySourceCoeffs
    {
        selectionMode   all;

        tau             0.0003;
        kappa1          0.9;
        kappa2          20;
    }
}

Run the application

In the case directory, run:

$ phaseFieldFoam

Post-processing

Contour plots

The sump profile can be plotted from the VTK files that are saved in the postProcessing directory using the phase.plot.plot_crystal() function.

Predicted crystal contour and under-cooling after 0.5 s of growth.

Benchmarking

To check if the numerical predictions are identical to the benchmark, run the following commands in the case directory:

$ cd test
$ cmake -S . -B build
$ cd build
$ make
$ BOOST_TEST_LOG_LEVEL=message ./test_phasefield