An Eulerian description of the streaming process in the lattice Boltzmann equation

This paper presents a novel strategy for solving discrete Boltzmann equation (DBE) for simulation of fluid flows. This strategy splits the solution procedure into streaming and collision steps as in the lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE) method. The streaming step can then be carried out by solving pure linear advection equations in an Eulerian framework. This offers two significant advantages over previous methods. First, the relationship between the relaxation parameter and the discretization of the collision term developed from the LBE method is directly applicable to the DBE method. The resulting DBE collision step remains local and poses no constraint on time step. Second, decoupling of the advection step from the collision step facilitates implicit discretization of the advection equation on arbitrary meshes. An implicit unstructured DBE method is constructed based on this strategy and is evaluated using several test cases of flow over a backward-facing step, lid-driven cavity flow, and flow past a circular cylinder. The speedup of convergence for some cases improves by a factor of about 20.