Tusas: A fully implicit parallel approach for coupled phase-field equations

Abstract

We develop a fully-coupled, fully-implicit approach for phase-field modeling of solidification in metals and alloys. Predictive simulation of solidification in pure metals and metal alloys remains a significant challenge in the field of materials science, as microstructure formation during the solidification process plays a critical role in the properties and performance of the solid material. Our simulation approach consists of a finite element spatial discretization of the fully-coupled nonlinear system of partial differential equations at the microscale, which is treated implicitly in time with a preconditioned Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov method. The approach allows time steps larger than those restricted by the traditional explicit CFL limit and is algorithmically scalable as well as efficient due to an effective preconditioning strategy based on algebraic multigrid and block factorization. We implement this approach in the open-source Tusas framework, which is a general, flexible tool developed in C++ for solving coupled systems of nonlinear partial differential equations. The performance of our approach is analyzed in terms of algorithmic scalability and efficiency, while the computational performance of Tusas is presented in terms of parallel scalability and efficiency on emerging heterogeneous architectures. We demonstrate that modern algorithms, discretizations, and computational science, and heterogeneous hardware provide a robust route for predictive phase-field simulation of microstructure evolution during additive manufacturing.

Accepted for Publication in the Journal of Computational Physics

References in corpus (8)

• Strong scaling of general-purpose molecular dynamics simulations on GPUs
• Finite Interface Dissipation Phase Field Modeling of Ni-Nb under Additive Manufacturing Conditions
• On the primary spacing and microsegregation of cellular dendrites in laser deposited Ni-Nb alloys
• Simulation and analysis of $\gamma$-Ni cellular growth during laser powder deposition of Ni-based superalloys
• Predictive modeling of solidification during laser additive manufacturing of nickel superalloys: Recent developments, future directions
• Phase Field Benchmark Problems for Dendritic Growth and Linear Elasticity
• Formation of Nb-rich droplets in laser deposited Ni-matrix microstructures
• Simulation of temperature, stress and microstructure fields during laser deposition of Ti-6Al-4V

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Time series forecasting of multiphase microstructure evolution using deep learning
• Orientation selection in alloy dendritic evolution during melt-pool solidification
• Exploring large language models for microstructure evolution in materials
• Effects of isotherm patterns on cellular interface morphologies of melt pool origin