Anisotropic, adaptive finite elements for the computation of a solutal dendrite

We compute solutions of solutal phase-field models for dendritic growth of an isothermal binary alloy using anisotropic mesh refinement techniques. The adaptive strategy is based on anisotropic a posteriori estimators using a superconvergent recovery technique in the form of the Zienkiewicz-Zhu error estimator. The phase-field model contains an anisotropic strongly nonlinear second order operator modelling the dendritic branches; this strong nonlinearity is included in the a posteriori error estimators by using a monotonicity result. The monotonicity holds for phase-field anisotropy below a certain threshold value beyond which there are no known well-posedness results. We present computational results for both regimes showing the performance of the proposed method.