Development of a three dimensional meshless numerical method for the solution of the Boltzmann equation on complex geometries

Abstract

We propose a three dimensional meshless numerical scheme based on the Boltzmann equation for the simulation of fluid flows in domains of complex geometries. The velocity space discretization in our method is the same as the standard lattice Boltzmann method, i.e. the same lattices are used to discretize microscopic velocities. The velocity-discrete Boltzmann equation with the BGK collision approximation is discretized in time using the Lax–Wendroff scheme, and subsequently in space using the meshless local Petrov–Galerkin method based on local radial basis functions augmented with polynomials. The method is first validated and tuned by solving two benchmark problems: The pressure-driven flow in an elliptical tube, and the three-dimensional lid-driven cavity flow. The error analysis for the first case shows the second order accuracy of the proposed method. The flow in a packed bed is then solved in order to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method in the simulation of geometrically complex flows. The results show that both the computational time and the memory usage of our method are lower than those of the standard lattice Boltzmann method for the geometrically complex flows.