On a phase field model for solid-liquid phase transitions

Existence problems for PDEs: global existence, local existence, non-existence (35A01) Initial-boundary value problems for second-order parabolic systems (35K51) Reaction-diffusion equations (35K57) Free boundary problems for PDEs (35R35) Stefan problems, phase changes, etc. (80A22)

Abstract: A new phase field model is introduced, which can be viewed as nontrivial generalisation of what is known as the Caginalp model. It involves in particular nonlinear diffusion terms. By formal asymptotic analysis, it is shown that in the sharp interface limit it still yields a Stefan-like model with: 1) a (generalized) Gibbs-Thomson relation telling how much the interface temperature differs from the equilibrium temperature when the interface is moving or/and is curved with surface tension; 2) a jump condition for the heat flux, which turns out to depend on the latent heat and on the velocity of the interface with a new, nonlinear term compared to standard models. From the PDE analysis point of view, the initial-boundary value problem is proved to be locally well-posed in time (for smooth data).

Review text

The authors introduced a new phase field model. The differences between their model and Caginalp like phase field models lie in two places, the first one is the phase field dependent coefficient of the temperature variable in the evolution equation of the phase field \(\varphi\), and the the second one is the nonlinear coefficient of \(\partial_t\varphi\) in the equation for the temperature. The authors study the asymptotic limit of the system as the parameter signifying the width of the diffuse interface tends to zero. By a formal asymptotic analysis, they are able to recover a generalized Stefan sharp interface model with the Gibbs-Thomson equation for surface tension, and jump conditions for the heat flux at the interface. Next, the authors turn their attention to the well-posedness of the phase field system. They prove that, under suitable initial and boundary data, the initial boundary value problem is well posed in both two and three space dimensions. A substantial part of the paper is devoted to proving the existence of weak solutions and the continuous dependence of the solution on the data by means of various a priori and energy estimates.

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