A grid refinement study of half-zone configuration of the Floating Zone growth system

Abstract

A grid refinement study was conducted to examine the thermo-solutal Marangoni convection occurring in a liquid bridge of a silicon-germanium system under zero gravity. In the model, the three dimensional field equations of the liquid zone, i.e. continuity, momentum, energy, and mass
transport equations, were solved by the PISO algorithm. The aspect ratio of the bridge was set as 0.5. Computations were performed using the open source software OpenFOAM. The simulation results showed that, at MaT = 2679 and MaC = 1786, while the horizontal concentration distribution is time-depended with rotation, the wave number depends on the total grid numbers. Results also show that QUICK scheme is suitable for simulating Marangoni convection in the FZ.