Stable phase field approximations of anisotropic solidification (Q2930137)

The authors introduce unconditionally stable finite element approximations for a phase field model for solidification, which takes highly anisotropic surface energy and kinetic effects into account. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 is an introduction. In Section 2, the two phase field models for the approximation of the sharp interface problem are stated. In Section 3, finite element approximations for these problems are introduced, and stability results for these approximations are proved. Solution methods for the discrete equations are briefly reviewed in Section 4. In addition, several numerical experiments are presented in Section 5.