Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.
Lately, the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM), as a
mesoscopic numerical approach, has received more attention in
studying complex fluid flows and transport phenomena.
Because of its distinctive advantages over conventional
numerical methods, the LBM has achieved great success in a
variety of fields since its emergence. The major advantages are
referred to its intrinsic linear scalability in parallel computing,
and its capability of easily handling complex geometry and
boundary conditions. In this study our proposed LB-BGK
model, for multi-fluid flows, has been first validated by 2
benchmark problems: 2D Poiseuille flow problem and liddriven
cavity flow. Following these simulations, a discussion
on the accuracy and the performance of the model is given.
Good agreement is obtained with the analytical solution of
Poiseuille flow problem, and with the available literature results
for 2D lid-cavity. On the other hand, the accuracy of LBM is
usually moderated by several factors; hence the effect of
different factors is investigated. Among those, we studied the
effect of boundary conditions, spatial resolution, Mach number,
and that of the choice of relaxation factors. Consequently, LBM
was found to be highly dependent on the physical problem, the
numerical implementation, and the used models and
correlations. In light of the obtained results, we can point out
that the LBM may possess high potential in studying fluid
flows with complex geometries.
