Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian formulation of lattice Boltzmann model for compressible flows on unstructured moving meshes

Abstract

We propose the application of the arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) technique to a compressible lattice Boltzmann model for the simulation of moving boundary problems on unstructured meshes. To that end, the kinetic equations are mapped from a moving physical domain into a fixed computational domain. The resulting equations in the computational domain are then numerically solved using the second-order accurate finite element reconstruction on an unstructured mesh. It is shown that the problem regarding the geometric conservation law (GCL), which needs a special treatment in the ALE Navier–Stokes solvers, does not appear here and the model satisfies the GCL exactly. The model is validated with a set of simulations including uniform flow preservation and compressible flow past an airfoil in plunging and pitching motion at different Mach numbers. It is demonstrated that the results are in good agreement with the experimental and other available numerical results in the literature. Finally, in order to show the capability of the proposed solver in simulating high-speed flows, transonic flow over pitching airfoil is investigated. It is shown that the proposed model is able to capture the complex characteristics of this flow, which involves multiple weak shock waves interacting with the boundary and shear layers.