Improved treatments for general boundary conditions in the lattice Boltzmann method for convection-diffusion and heat transfer processes

In spite of the increasing applications of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) in simulating various flow and transport systems in recent years, complex boundary conditions for the convection-diffusion and heat transfer processes in LBM have not been well addressed. In this paper, we propose an improved bounce-back method by using the midpoint concentration value to modify the bounced-back density distribution for LBM simulations of the concentration field. An accurate finite-difference scheme in the normal boundary direction has also been introduced for gradient boundary conditions. Compared with existing boundary methods, our method has a simple algorithm and can easily deal with boundaries with general geometries, motions, and surface conditions (the Dirichlet, Neumann, and mixed conditions). Carefully designed simulations are performed to examine the capacity and accuracy of this proposed boundary method. Simulation results are compared with those from theory and a representative boundary method, and an improved performance is observed. We have also simulated the effect of reference velocity on global accuracy to examine the performance of our model in preserving the fundamental Galilean invariance. These boundary treatments for concentration boundary conditions can be readily applied to other processes such as heat transfer systems.