• Proceedings of the Korea Association of Crystal Growth Conference
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• 1996.06b
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• pp.285-309
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• 1996

Non oxide ceramics such as nitrides of transition metals have shown significant potential for future economic impact, in diverse applications in ceramic, aerospace and electronic industries, as refractory products, abrasives and cutting tools, aircraft components, and semi-conductor substrates amid others. Combustion synthesis has become an attractive alternative to the conventional furnace technology to produce these materials cheaply, faster and at a higher level of purity. However he process os highly exothermic and manifests complex dynamics due to its strongly non-linear nature. In order to develop an understanding of this process and to study the effect of operational parameters on the final outcome, numerical modeling is necessary, which would generated essential knowledge to help scale-up the process. the model is based on a system of parabolic-hyperbolic partial differential equations representing the heat, mass and momentum conservation relations. The model also takes into account structural change due to sintering and volumetric expansion, and their effect on the transport properties of the system. The solutions of these equations exhibit steep moving spatial gradients in the form of reaction fronts, propagating in space with variable velocity, which gives rise to varying time scales. To cope with the possibility of extremely abrupt changes in the values of the solution over very short distances, adaptive mesh techniques can be applied to resolve the high activity regions by ordering grid points in appropriate places. To avoid a control volume formulation of the solution of partial differential equations, a simple orthogonal, adaptive-mesh technique is employed. This involves separate adaptation in the x and y directions. Through simple analysis and numerical examples, the adaptive mesh is shown to give significant increase in accuracy in the computations.