Concepts of modeling surface energy anisotropy in phase-field approaches

• Main Authors: Oleg Tschukin, Alexander Silberzahn, Michael Selzer, Prince G. K. Amos, Daniel Schneider, Britta Nestler
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2017-10-01
• Series: Geothermal Energy
• Subjects: Phase field; Anisotropy; Allen–Cahn equation
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40517-017-0077-9

Abstract To simulate the growth of geological veins, it is necessary to model the crystal shape anisotropy. Two different models, classical and natural models, which incorporate the surface energy anisotropy into the objective functional of Ginzburg–Landau type, are presented here. Phase-field evolution equations, considered in this work, are derived using the variational approach, and correspond to the conservative Allen–Cahn-type equation. For three characteristic anisotropy formulations, we show what kind of difficulties arise in the simulations for the presented models. Particularly, if the anisotropy becomes strong, the phase-field evolution equations become ill-posed. Thus, we present regularized phase-field models and discuss the corresponding simulation results. Furthermore, in the scope of the grain growth simulation, we extend the original two-phase models to multiphases.