[Pierluigi Tagliabue]

Hi everyone! I am new to this forum, this is my first question to the community, I hope it can be useful to me (and others maybe).

I am simulating a (sodium) melting problem using STAR-CCM+. I am not using any CFD resource of the software, since the idea is to simulate the phase transition using heat conduction equations only to simplify the description of the process.

I am folloing a method for which it would be convenient for me to define a user-defined function for the sodium specific heat. However, when specifying the Physics models in the Continua node, there is no option to insert the specific heat like I would like to. I can only put a table, which is not suitable for me, since it will make the problem prone to numerical instabilities during the melting process because of the strong non-linear nature of the specific heat in the melting region.

The algorithm I would like to implent to solve this issue is the equivalent heat capacity method (AN EFFICIENT ALGORITHM FOR FINITE-DIFFERENCE
ANALYSES OF HEAT TRANSFER WITH MELTING AND
SOLIDIFICATION, J.S. Hsiao).

Any idea on how to define the specific heat using a user-defined function?

Thanks!

Pierluigi