A STUDY OF CONTINUUM MECHANICS AND PHASE CHANGE PROBLEMS AND IT’S NUMERICAL MODELLING USING OPENFOAM

Resumo

Several applications in continuum mechanics involve processes such as solidification and

melting of materials, natural convection, stresses and deformations in solids, among other related pheno-
mena. Given the complexity of the phenomena related to these processes, the numerical and computati-
onal modeling are powerful and of low costs tools suitable to understand and simulate problems which

may envolve one or more of these complex phenomena. In this paper, a set of mathematical models
representing some of these processes is introduced, discretized and solved by the Finite Volume Method,

using open-source package OpenFOAM, a based C++ toolbox for the development of customized nume-
rical solvers, and pre-/post-processing utilities for the solution of continuum mechanics problems from

computational fluid dynamics, including also static solid elastic problems. Application examples are

shown including the gallium melting problem, a process commonly needed in computer chips manufac-
turing; the lid-driven cavity problem, widely used for testing, verification and validation of numerical

procedures and a simple linear elasticity problem. We show some of the basic features of OpenFOAM
as well as explore some of its potential pointing on some possible disadvantages of this code.