Lattice Boltzmann scheme for fluids with dynamic heterogeneities

Abstract

We introduce and discuss a three-dimensional mesoscopic lattice Boltzmann model for the numerical simulation of strongly-interacting fluids with dynamic inhomogeneities. The model is based on an extension of the standard lattice Boltzmann dynamics in which streaming between neighboring lattice sites is constrained by the value of the nonlocal density of the surrounding fluid. The resulting dynamics exhibits typical features of dynamically heterogeneous fluids, such as long-time relaxation, non-Gaussian density distributions and dynamic heterogeneities. Due to its intrinsically parallel dynamics and absence of statistical noise, the method is expected to compute significantly faster than molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo, and lattice glass models.