Large temperature difference heat dominated flow simulations using a pressure-based lattice Boltzmann method with mass correction

Abstract

This paper addresses simulation of heat dominated compressible flows in a closed cavity using a pressure-based lattice Boltzmann (LB) method, in which thermal effects are modeled by applying a pressure-featured zero-order moment of distribution functions. A focus is made on the conservation of mass at boundary nodes, which is a challenging issue that significantly complicated by the density-decoupled zero-order moment here. The mass leakage at boundary nodes is mathematically quantified, which enables an efficient local mass correction scheme. The performance of this solver is assessed by simulating buoyancy-driven flows in a closed deferentially heated cavity with large temperature differences (non-Boussinesq) at Rayleigh numbers ranging from 103 to 107. Simulations show that mass leakage at solid walls in such configurations is a critical issue to obtain reliable solutions, and it eventually leads to simulations overflow when the cavity is inclined. The proposed mass correction scheme is, however, shown to be effective to control the mass leakage and get accurate solutions. Thus, associated with the proposed mass conservation scheme, the pressure-based LB method becomes reliable to study natural convection dominated flows at large temperature differences in closed geometries with mesh aligned boundaries or not.