Conservative scheme for the thermodiffusion Stefan problem (Q2435155)

The authors deal with some new aspects in the application of the principle of conservation to the solution of evolution problems in domains with moving boundaries for the case in which the law of their motion is not given in advance and should be determined in the course of the solution of the problem. They consider the thermodiffusion Stefan problem, i.e., the problem of the crystalization of solutions whose phase transition temperature depends on the composition of the liquid and solid phase. The main novelty of this paper lays in the fact that the authors construct for the thermodiffusion Stefan problem a family of conservative finite difference schemes that inherit the main properties of the original differential problem. Roughly speaking, for the thermodiffusion Stefan problem on a moving and a fixed grid, they demonstrate a technique for constructing divergence and nondivergence finite difference schemes guaranteeing that the energy and mass conservation laws hold in the discrete model. Additionally, they single out a class of finite difference schemes for which the front rectification method and the moving grid method are algebraically equivalent. Also, they present the results of computations illustrating the action of fictitious sources appearing in the computations when using nonconservative shemes. The papers is written at a very high mathematical level.