Dependence of Lamellar Eutectic Growth with Convection on Boundary Conditions and Geometric Confinement: A Phase-Field Lattice-Boltzmann Study

Simulating eutectic growth with convection is challenging because of the enormous computing demand resulting from the required domain size compared with the eutectic scale. In this study, a phase-field lattice-Boltzmann approach was employed to reproduce the eutectic growth with convection (both natural and forced). To enable and accelerate large-scale simulations, a parallel-adaptive mesh refinement algorithm was developed to combine with this numerical approach. The effects of the boundary conditions and the geometric confinement on the eutectic growth with convection were systematically investigated in the Al-Cu eutectic alloy. Results showed that both boundary conditions and the geometric confinement altered the eutectic evolution by affecting the distributions of the solute and velocity ahead of the eutectic solid/liquid interface. As the first attempt to explore the two factors on the eutectic growth with convection, our thorough investigation lays a foundation for modeling the coupled convection–solute eutectic evolution.