Stabilizing the thermal lattice Boltzmann method by spatial filtering.

Gillissen, J J J · Phys Rev E · 2016

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

We propose to stabilize the thermal lattice Boltzmann method by filtering the second- and third-order moments of the collision operator. By means of the Chapman-Enskog expansion, we show that the additional numerical diffusivity diminishes in the low-wavnumber limit. To demonstrate the enhanced stability, we consider a three-dimensional thermal lattice Boltzmann system involving 33 discrete velocities. Filtering extends the linear stability of this thermal lattice Boltzmann method to 10-fold smaller transport coefficients. We further demonstrate that the filtering does not compromise the accuracy of the hydrodynamics by comparing simulation results to reference solutions for a number of standardized test cases, including natural convection in two dimensions.