PCM Thermal Storage Panel: Latent-Heat Melt Front (2D Stefan-Problem Engine)

Phase-change materials store heat mostly as latent heat: they absorb a large amount of energy while melting at an almost constant temperature, instead of just warming up. This 2D companion to the capsule-array PCM simulator solves the classic single-phase Stefan moving-boundary problem directly: a real energy-balance ODE is integrated numerically, frame by frame, to trace the melt front's position as it advances inward from the heated wall at a continuously decelerating rate. A live plot tracks front position against elapsed time, and a running log-log linear regression on that trajectory reports the measured power-law slope so you can confirm the front genuinely obeys the textbook x(t) ∝ √t scaling rather than moving at a constant speed.