Solid/liquid density differences and the initial stages of phase change in the presence of natural convection

Abstract

Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Malta, 16-18 July, 2012.

The solidification of a pure liquid phasechange material in the presence of natural convection is a commonly recurring problem in natural science and technology. The numerical solution of this Stefan problem is made difficult by the fact that there is initially no solid phase; hence, the classical 1D Neumann similarity solution is often used for the purposes of initiating a computation. However, if the solid and liquid phases have different densities at the solidification temperature, this solution is not valid. This paper considers the limit of the coupled heat and momentum equations for small times, and finds that it is not possible to solve the corresponding problem, when the densities are different, without introducing a singularity into the liquid velocity and pressure. The solution to a non-classical Stefan problem, where cooling is due to a constant heat flux, is also considered, and is found to be free from such singularities