Phase change driven adaptive mesh refinement in PFEM

The particle finite element method (PFEM) is used to simulate a simple phase change problem. This is a first step towards the simulation of additive manufacturing (AM) processes at the meso-scale, where the liquid melt pool interacts with the surrounding solid material and undergoes phase change. The focus of this paper lies on strategies to deal with the release or absorption of latent heat in the PFEM, especially with regard to mesh refinement. We briefly describe how mesh refinement in PFEM works and how it can be chosen specifically to achieve convergence despite the highly non-linear latent heat term. It is found that good agreement with the literature can be achieved on a simple 1D phase change test case, while using an automatic local mesh refinement.