In this paper, we propose the phase-field simulation of dendritic crystal growth in both two- and three-dimensional spaces with adaptive mesh refinement, which was designed to solve nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations. The proposed numerical method, based on operator splitting techniques, can use large time step sizes and exhibits excellent stability. In addition, the resulting discrete system of equations is solved by a fast numerical method such as an adaptive multigrid method. Comparisons to uniform mesh method, explicit adaptive method, and previous numerical experiments for crystal growth simulations are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed method. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.