Simulation of thermal flow problems via a hybrid immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann method

Abstract

A hybrid immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann method (IB-LBM) is presented in this work to simulate the thermal flow problems. In current approach, the flow field is resolved by using our recently developed boundary condition-enforced IB-LBM (Wu and Shu, (2009)). The nonslip boundary condition on the solid boundary is enforced in simulation. At the same time, to capture the temperature development, the conventional energy equation is resolved. To model the effect of immersed boundary on temperature field, the heat source term is introduced. Different from previous studies, the heat source term is set as unknown rather than predetermined. Inspired by the idea in (Wu and Shu, (2009)), the unknown is calculated in such a way that the temperature at the boundary interpolated from the corrected temperature field accurately satisfies the thermal boundary condition. In addition, based on the resolved temperature correction, an efficient way to compute the local and average Nusselt numbers is also proposed in this work. As compared with traditional implementation, no approximation for temperature gradients is required. To validate the present method, the numerical simulations of forced convection are carried out. The obtained results show good agreement with data in the literature. Copyright © 2012 J. Wu et al.