A comparative study of three classes of boundary treatment schemes for coupled LBM/DEM simulations

Abstract

A comparative study of three classes of fluid-solid boundary treatment schemes in the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is conducted to evaluate their accuracy and computational efficiency. The three classes are the bounce-back (BB) based schemes, the partially saturated computational (PSC) method and the immersed boundary method (IBM). The flow past a fixed circular cylinder and the sedimentation of a circular particle in a confined cavity are considered as the reference test cases. It is found that all three classes of schemes can yield reasonable results in general, with interpolated BB (IBB) showing better accuracy than others for every case studied. In addition, some force fluctuations are observed with the IBB and BB when the solid is moving. This study may help researchers to select an applicable boundary treatment scheme for their coupled LBM-DEM.