Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1853124656 ISBN 13: 9781853124655

Publisher: WIT Press / Computational Mechanics, 1997

This book contains papers presented at the Fourth International Conference on Computational Modelling of Free and Moving Boundary Problems, which will be held in Ghent, Belgium, August 27-29, 1997. The Conference was jointly organized by the Wessex Institute of Technology, UK, and the Department of Mathematical Analysis of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Ghent, Belgium. The conference followed three successful previous meetings in the series, held in Southampton, UK (1991), Milan, Italy (1993), and Bled, Slovenia (1995).

The classification `free boundary problem' or `moving boundary problem' can be applied to a wide variety of problems in the physical sciences, technology and engineering. The feature all these problems have in common is the presence, in the mathematical model, of an initially unknown (free) boundary or a boundary which moves throughout the analysis, the determination of which is an important part of the solution procedure. Practical examples are ingot solidification and scrap melting in metallurgy, free surface flows in hydraulics and fluid mechanics, the cooling and freezing of foodstuffs in the food industry, to name but a few. Although completely different in nature, these problems have several common features regarding their mathematical modeling and computational methods of solution. Only in special cases can problems of this type be solved analytically. Therefore a new scientific discipline of approximate and numerical methods for such problems has evolved. Recent advances in this wide and rapidly growing discipline are reported in this volume.