A direct-forcing immersed boundary method for the thermal lattice Boltzmann method

In this study, a direct-forcing immersed boundary method (IBM) for thermal lattice Boltzmann method (TLBM) is proposed to simulate the non-isothermal flows. The direct-forcing IBM formulas for thermal equations are derived based on two TLBM models: a double-population model with a simplified thermal lattice Boltzmann equation (Model 1) and a hybrid model with an advection–diffusion equation of temperature (Model 2). As an interface scheme, which is required due to a mismatch between boundary and computational grids in the IBM, the sharp interface scheme based on second-order bilinear and linear interpolations (instead of the diffuse interface scheme, which uses discrete delta functions) is adopted to obtain the more accurate results. The proposed methods are validated through convective heat transfer problems with not only stationary but also moving boundaries – the natural convection in a square cavity with an eccentrically located cylinder and a cold particle sedimentation in an infinite channel. In terms of accuracy, the results from the IBM based on both models are comparable and show a good agreement with those from other numerical methods. In contrast, the IBM based on Model 2 is more numerically efficient than the IBM based on Model 1.