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April 15, 2012 3:28am UTC

Melting&Free surface Marangoni flow

Greeting,

I am trying to model laser melting of a metal with Comsol 3.5a or 4.2a. I am wondering what kind of interface I should use to mode the liquid/gas and liquid/solid interface. The physics of this model is like this:

1. A metal is heated by laser till melting.
2. While melting, the liquid part of the metal flows because of surface tension gradient induced by temperature gradient (inner part is hotter while the outer part cooler). That is the so-called Marangoni flow.
3. After shutting down the laser, the metal cools down and solidifies with surface ripples introduced by Marangoni flow.

So the input is laser heat flux and output is surface profile after solidification.

I am not so worried about the liquid/solid interface because I think I bypass the problem by using temperature-dependent properties, but whoever has better ideas, please let me know. I am more worried about the free surface interface of liquid/gas which I need to apply both the heat input and surface tension equations (That is the part I could not make it with Ansys, so I moved to Comsol). If you have any thoughts, it will be great help for me.

Thanks a lot in advance!!!

Best,
Chao

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