Multi-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann model for axisymmetric flows

In this paper, a lattice-Boltzmann equation (LBE) with multi relaxation times (MRT) is presented for axisymmetric flows. The model is an extension of a recent model with single-relaxation-time [Guo et al., Phys. Rev. E 79, 046708 (2009)], which was developed based on the axisymmetric Boltzmann equation. Due to the use of the MRT collision model, the present model can achieve better numerical stability. The model is validated by some numerical tests including the Hagen-Poiseuille flow, the pulsatile Womersley flow, and the external flow over a sphere. Numerical results are in excellent agreement with analytical solutions or other available data, and the improvement in numerical stability is also confirmed.     

Multi-level lattice Boltzmann model on square lattice for compressible flows

A compressible lattice Boltzmann model is established on a square lattice. The model allows large variations in the mean velocity by introducing a large particle-velocity set. To maintain tractability, the support set of the equilibrium distribution is chosen to include only four directions and three particle-velocity levels in which the third level is introduced to improve the stability of the model. This simple structure of the equilibrium distribution makes the model efficient for the simulation of flows over a wide range of Mach numbers and gives it the capability of capturing shock jumps. Unlike the standard lattice Boltzmann model, the formulation eliminated the fourth-order velocity tensors, which were the source of concerns over the homogeneity of square lattices. A modified collision invariant eliminates the second-order discretization error of the fluctuation velocity in the macroscopic conservation equation from which the Navier–Stokes equation and energy equation are recovered. The model is suitable for both viscous and inviscid compressible flows with or without shocks. Two-dimensional shock-wave propagations and boundary layer flows were successfully simulated. The model can be easily extended to three-dimensional cubic lattices.     

Optimizing lattice Boltzmann simulations for unsteady flows

We present detailed analysis of a lattice Boltzmann approach to model time-dependent Newtonian flows. The aim of this study is to find optimized simulation parameters for a desired accuracy with minimal computational time. Simulation parameters for fixed Reynolds and Womersley numbers are studied. We investigate influences from the Mach number and different boundary conditions on the accuracy and performance of the method and suggest ways to enhance the convergence behavior.     

A thermal lattice Boltzmann model with diffuse scattering boundary condition for micro thermal flows

A lattice Boltzmann model for simulating isothermal micro flows has been proposed by us recently [Niu XD, Chew YT, Shu C. A lattice Boltzmann BGK model for simulation of micro flows. Europhys Lett 2004;67(4):600]. In this paper, we extend the model to simulate the micro thermal flows. In particular, the thermal lattice Boltzmann equation (TLBE) [He X, Chen S, Doolen GD. A novel thermal model for the lattice Boltzmann method in incompressible limit. J Comput Phys 1998;146:282] is used with modification of the relaxation times linking to the Knudsen number. The diffuse scattering boundary condition (DSBC) derived in our early model is extended to consider temperature jump at wall boundaries. Simple theoretical analyses of the DSBC are presented and the results are found to be consistent with the conventional velocity slip and temperature jump boundary conditions. Numerical validations are carried out by simulating two-dimensional thermal Couette flows and developing thermal flows in a microchannel, and the obtained results are found to be in good agreement with those given from the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC), the molecular dynamics (MD) approaches and the Maxwell theoretical prediction.     

A fractional step lattice Boltzmann method for simulating high Reynolds number flows

A fractional step lattice Boltzmann scheme is presented to greatly improve the stability of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) in modelling incompressible flows at high Reynolds number. This method combines the good features of the conventional LBM and the fractional step technique. Through the fractional step, the flow at an extreme case of infinite Reynolds number (inviscid flow) can be effectively simulated. In addition, the non-slip boundary condition can be directly implemented.     

Large-scale parallel lattice Boltzmann–cellular automaton model of two-dimensional dendritic growth

An extremely scalable lattice Boltzmann (LB)–cellular automaton (CA) model for simulations of two-dimensional (2D) dendritic solidification under forced convection is presented. The model incorporates effects of phase change, solute diffusion, melt convection, and heat transport. The LB model represents the diffusion, convection, and heat transfer phenomena. The dendrite growth is driven by a difference between actual and equilibrium liquid composition at the solid–liquid interface. The CA technique is deployed to track the new interface cells. The computer program was parallelized using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) technique. Parallel scaling of the algorithm was studied and major scalability bottlenecks were identified. Efficiency loss attributable to the high memory bandwidth requirement of the algorithm was observed when using multiple cores per processor. Parallel writing of the output variables of interest was implemented in the binary Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5) to improve the output performance, and to simplify visualization. Calculations were carried out in single precision arithmetic without significant loss in accuracy, resulting in 50% reduction of memory and computational time requirements. The presented solidification model shows a very good scalability up to centimeter size domains, including more than ten million of dendrites.     

A lattice Boltzmann study of gas flows in a long micro-channel

In this paper, the pressure-driven flow in a long micro-channel is studied via a lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE) method. With the inclusion of the gas–wall collision effects, the LBE is able to capture the flow behaviors in the transition regime. The numerical results are compared with available data of other methods. Furthermore, the effects of rarefaction and compressibility on the deviation of the pressure distribution from the linear one are also investigated.     

A discrete Boltzmann equation model for two-phase shallow granular flows

In this paper a Discrete Boltzmann Equation model (hereinafter DBE) is proposed as solution method of the two-phase shallow granular flow equations, a complex nonlinear partial differential system, resulting from the depth-averaging procedure of mass and momentum equations of granular flows. The latter, as e.g. a debris flow, are flows of mixtures of solid particles dispersed in an ambient fluid.The reason to use a DBE, instead of a more conventional numerical model (e.g. based on Riemann solvers), is that the DBE is a set of linear advection equations, which replaces the original complex nonlinear partial differential system, while preserving the features of its solutions. The interphase drag function, an essential characteristic of any two-phase model, is accounted for easily in the DBE by adding a physically based term. In order to show the validity of the proposed approach, the following relevant benchmark tests have been considered: the 1D simple Riemann problem, the dam break problem with the wet–dry transition of the liquid phase, the dry bed generation and the perturbation of a state at rest in 2D. Results are satisfactory and show how the DBE is able to reproduce the dynamics of the two-phase shallow granular flow.     

Evaluation of three lattice Boltzmann models for multiphase flows in porous media

A free energy (FE) model, the Shan–Chen (S–C) model, and the Rothman and Keller (R–K) model are studied numerically to evaluate their performance in modeling two-dimensional (2D) immiscible two-phase flow in porous media on the pore scale. The FE model is proved to satisfy the Galilean invariance through a numerical test and the mass conservation of each component in the simulations is exact. Two-phase layered flow in a channel with different viscosity ratios was simulated. Comparing with analytical solutions, we see that the FE model and the R–K model can give very accurate results for flows with large viscosity ratios. In terms of accuracy and stability, the FE model and the R–K model are much better than the S–C model. Co-current and countercurrent two-phase flows in complex homogeneous media were simulated and the relative permeabilities were obtained. Again, it is found that the FE model is as good as the R–K model in terms of accuracy and efficiency. The FE model is shown to be a good tool for the study of two-phase flows with high viscosity ratios in porous media.     

An improved entropic lattice Boltzmann model for parallel computation

In this paper, we suggest two kinds of approximation methods based on Taylor series expansion which can solve the non-linear equation in entropic lattice Boltzmann model without using any iteration methods such as Newton–Raphson method. The advantage of our methods is to be able to avoid the load imbalance in parallel computation which occurs due to the differences of iteration number on each calculation grid. In this study, ELBM simulations using our methods were compared with those using Newton–Raphson method for the channel flow past a square cylinder in Re = 1000 and the validity of the results and computational effort were investigated. As a result, it was found that the solutions obtained by our methods are qualitatively and quantitatively reasonable and CPU time is shorter than those obtained by Newton–Raphson method.     

A multiphase lattice Boltzmann study of buoyancy-induced mixing in a tilted channel

We study the buoyancy-induced interpenetration of two immiscible fluids in a tilted channel by a two-phase lattice Boltzmann method using a non-ideal gas equation of state well-suited for two incompressible fluids. The method is simple, elegant and easily parallelizable. After first validating the code for simulating Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities in a unstably-stratified flow, we applied the code to simulate the buoyancy-induced mixing in a tilted channel at various Atwood numbers, Reynolds numbers, tilt angles, and surface tension parameters. The effects of these parameters are studied in terms of the flow structures, front velocities, and velocity profiles. For one set of parameters, comparisons have also been made with results of a finite volume method. The present results are seen to agree well with those of a finite volume method in the interior of the flow; however near the boundary there is some discrepancy.     

A lattice Boltzmann model for the Korteweg-de Vries equation with two conservation laws

A lattice Boltzmann model for the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation is presented by using the higher-order moment method. In contrast to the previous lattice Boltzmann model to the KdV equation, our method has higher-order accuracy. Two key steps in the development of this model are the addition of a momentum conservation condition, and the construction of a correlation between the first conservation law and the second conservation law. The numerical example shows the higher-order moment method can be used to raise the truncation error of the lattice Boltzmann scheme.     

A lattice Boltzmann model for electromagnetic waves propagating in a one-dimensional dispersive medium

A first-order extended lattice Boltzmann (LB) model with special forcing terms for one-dimensional Maxwell equations exerting on a dispersive medium, described either by the Debye or Drude model, is proposed in this study. The time dependent dispersive effect is obtained by the inverse Fourier transform of the frequency-domain permittivity and is incorporated into the LB evolution equations via equivalent forcing effects. The Chapman–Enskog multi-scale analysis is employed to ensure that proposed scheme is mathematically consistent with the targeted Maxwell’s equations at the macroscopic limit. Numerical validations are executed through simulating four representative cases to obtain their LB solutions and compare those with the analytical solutions and existing numerical solutions by finite difference time domain (FDTD). All comparisons show that the differences in numerical values are very small. The present model can thus accurately predict the dispersive effects, and demonstrate first order convergence. In addition to its accuracy, the proposed LB model is also easy to implement. Consequently, this new LB scheme is an effective approach for numerical modeling of EM waves in dispersive media.     

A high-performance lattice Boltzmann implementation to model flow in porous media

We examine the problem of simulating single and multiphase flow in porous medium systems at the pore scale using the lattice Boltzmann (LB) method. The LB method is a powerful approach, but one which is also computationally demanding; the resolution needed to resolve fundamental phenomena at the pore scale leads to very large lattice sizes, and hence substantial computational and memory requirements that necessitate the use of massively parallel computing approaches. Common LB implementations for simulating flow in porous media store the full lattice, making parallelization straightforward but wasteful. We investigate a two-stage implementation consisting of a sparse domain decomposition stage and a simulation stage that avoids the need to store and operate on lattice points located within a solid phase. A set of five domain decomposition approaches are investigated for single and multiphase flow through both homogeneous and heterogeneous porous medium systems on different parallel computing platforms. An orthogonal recursive bisection method yields the best performance of the methods investigated, showing near linear scaling and substantially less storage and computational time than the traditional approach.     

Non-body-fitted Cartesian-mesh simulation of highly turbulent flows using multi-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann method

This paper presents a lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) based study aimed at numerical simulation of highly turbulent and largely inclined flow around obstacles of curved geometry using non-body-fitted Cartesian meshes. The approach features (1) combining the interpolated bounce-back scheme with the LBM of multi-relaxation-time (MRT) type to enable the use of simple Cartesian mesh for the flow cases even with complex geometries; and (2) incorporating the Spalart–Allmaras (SA) turbulence model into LBM in order to represent the turbulent flow effect. The numerical experiments are performed corresponding to flows around an NACA0012 airfoil at Re=5×10⁵ and around a flat plate at Re=2×10⁴, respectively. The agreement between all simulation results obtained from this study and the data provided by other literature demonstrates the reliability of the enhanced LBM proposed in this paper for simulating, simply on Cartesian meshes, complex flows that may involve bodies of curved boundary, high Reynolds number, and large angle of attack.     

Multi-block lattice Boltzmann simulations of subcritical flow in open channel junctions

A two-dimensional lattice Boltzmann model (LBM) for subcritical flows in open channel junctions is developed. Shallow water equations coupled with the large eddy simulation model is numerically simulated by the lattice Boltzmann method, so that the turbulence, caused by the combination of the main channel and tributary flows, can be taken into account and modeled efficiently. In order to obtain more detailed and accurate results, a multi-block lattice scheme is designed and applied at the area of combining flows. The model is first verified by experimental data for a 90° junction flow, then is used to investigate the effect of the junction angle on flow characteristics, such as velocity field, water depth and separation zone. The objectives of this study are to validate the two-dimensional LBM in junction flow simulation and compare the results with available experimental data and classical analytical solutions in the separation zone.     

Three-dimensional lattice Boltzmann simulations of high density ratio two-phase flows in porous media

A three-dimensional multiphase lattice Boltzmann model is implemented to study the spontaneous phase transport in complex porous media. The model is validated against the analytical solution of Young’s and Laplace’s laws. Afterward, three-dimensional porous layers are randomly generated to investigate droplet penetration into a substrate, liquid transport in a porous channel as well as extraction of a droplet from a porous medium. Effects of several geometrical and flow parameters such as porosity, density ratio, Reynolds number, Weber number, Froude number and contact angle are considered. A parametric study of the influence of main non-dimensional parameters upon the impact of liquid drops on permeable surface is performed. Results show that while increasing Froude number causes spreading of the droplet on the surface, increasing Reynolds number, Weber number, porosity and liquid-air density ratio will enhance the penetration rate into the surface. Furthermore, increasing the contact angle decreases both the spreading and the penetration rate at the same time. In the same way, for the liquid transport in a porous channel, it is found that increasing the porosity and Reynolds number will result in increasing penetration rate in the channel. For the extraction of a droplet from a porous medium, it is shown that by increasing the gravitational force and/or porosity the droplet extracts faster from the substrate.     

Stable free surface flows with the lattice Boltzmann method on adaptively coarsened grids

In this paper we will present an algorithm to perform free surface flow simulations with the lattice Boltzmann method on adaptive grids. This reduces the required computational time by more than a factor of three for simulations with large volumes of fluid. To achieve this, the simulation of large fluid regions is performed with coarser grid resolutions. We have developed a set of rules to dynamically adapt the coarse regions to the movement of the free surface, while ensuring the consistency of all grids. Furthermore, the free surface treatment is combined with a Smagorinsky turbulence model and a technique for adaptive time steps to ensure stable simulations. The method is validated by comparing the position of the free surface with an uncoarsened simulation. It yields speedup factors of up to 3.85 for a simulation with a resolution of 480³ cells and three coarser grid levels, and thus enables efficient and stable simulations of free surface flows, e.g. for highly detailed physically based animations of fluids.