A characteristic Galerkin method with adaptive error control for the continuous casting problem

Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., 189 (2000), 249-276.

Zhiming Chen
Institute of Mathematics
Academia Sinica
Beijing 100080, P.R. China

zmchen@math03.math.ac.cn

Ricardo H. Nochetto
Department of Mathematics
University of Maryland, College Park
College Park, MD 20742, USA

rhn@math.umd.edu

Alfred Schmidt
Institut fur Angewandte Mathematik
Universitat Freiburg
7800 Freiburg, Germany

alfred@mathematik.uni-freiburg.de

Abstract

The continuous casting problem is a convection-dominated nonlinearly degenerate diffusion problem. It is discretized implicitly in time via the method of characteristics, and in space via continuous piecewise linear finite elements. A posteriori error estimates are derived for the $L^1L^1$ norm of temperature which exhibit a mild explicit dependence on velocity. The analysis is based on special properties of a linear dual problem in non-divergence form with vanishing diffusion and strong advection. Several simulations with realistic physical parameters illustrate the reliability of the estimators and the flexibility of the proposed adaptive method.