Homogenization of Phase Transition Problems with Evolving Microstructure

We consider the mathematical analysis and homogenization of a moving boundary problem posed for a highly heterogeneous, periodically perforated domain. More specifically, we are looking at a one-phase thermo-elasticity system with phase transformations where small inclusions, initially periodically distributed, are growing or shrinking based on a kinetic under-cooling-type law and where surface stresses are created based on the curvature of the phase interface. This growth is assumed to be uniform in each individual cell of the the perforated domain. After transforming to the initial reference configuration (utilizing the Hanzawa transformation), we use the contraction mapping principle to show the existence of a unique solution for a possibly small but -independent time interval (is here the scale of heterogeneity). In the homogenization limit, we discover a macroscopic thermo-elasticity problem which is strongly non-linearly coupled (via an internal parameter called height function) to local changes in geometry. As a direct byproduct of the mathematical analysis work, we present an alternative equivalent formulation which lends itself to an effective precomputing strategy that is very much needed as the limit problem is computationally expensive.