Abstract
A numerical study on the Stefan problem occurred in cryosurgery is performed. Crank-Nicholson type finite difference algorithm based on the enthaly method is adapted to solve the phase change problem in this study. As it is a moving boundary problem, special emphasis is put on the estimation of the freezing front location. Two cases selected here are freezings of human tissue by disk type cryoprobe and by hemispherical one. In both cases, the heat flows are considered to be one dimensional. The calculated results using enthalpy method are compared with those using the program TRUMP and with Neumann's solution. These results agree guite well with each other. While it is pretty difficult to get accurate freezing front location by TRUMP due to the so- called "phase change knee" occured during the phase change, the algorithm based on the enthalpy method is proved to be very powerful to cope with this kind of problem.f problem.