Lattice Boltzmann computational fluid dynamics in three dimensions

Abstract

The recent development of the lattice gas method and its extension to the lattice Boltzmann method have provided new computational schemes for fluid dynamics. Both methods are fully paralleled and can easily model many different physical problems, including flows with complicated boundary conditions. In this paper, basic principles of a lattice Boltzmann computational method are described and applied to several three-dimensional benchmark problems. In most previous lattice gas and lattice Boltzmann methods, a face-centered-hyper-cubic lattice in four-dimensional space was used to obtain an isotropic stress tensor. To conserve computer memory, we develop a model which requires 14 moving directions instead of the usual 24 directions. Lattice Boltzmann models, describing two-phase fluid flows and magnetohydrodynamics, can be developed based on this simpler 14-directional lattice. Comparisons between three-dimensional spectral code results and results using our method are given for simple periodic geometries. An important property of the lattice Boltzmann method is that simulations for flow in simple and complex geometries have the same speed and efficiency, while all other methods, including the spectral method, are unable to model complicated geometries efficiently.