Introduction

There is hardly a product that, during its manufacture, does not undergo a process of melting and solidification. Engineering processes such as casting, welding, surface hardening or alloying, and crystallisation involve phase change. The processes of freezing and thawing are of interest in processing of foods. Phase-change materials (PCMs) are used in energy storage devices that enable storage and retrieval of energy at nearly constant temperature.

The phenomenon of melting or solidification is brought about by a process of latent heat (λ) transfer at the interface between solid and liquid phases. For a pure substance, throughout this process, the temperature Tm (melting point) of the interface remains constant whereas in the liquid and solid phases, the temperatures vary with time. Both λ and Tm are properties of a pure substance. Within each of the single phases, heat transfer is essentially governed by a process of unsteady heat conduction, although, under certain circumstances, convection may also be present in the liquid phase under the action of body (buoyancy, for example) or surface (surface tension) forces.

There are two approaches to solving phase-change problems:

1. the variable domain formulation and

2. the fixed domain (or fixed-grid) formulation.

In the first approach, which has several variants, two energy equations are solved in the solid and the liquid phases with temperatures Ts and Tl, respectively, as dependent variables.