Hydrodynamic behavior of the Pseudo-Potential lattice Boltzmann method for interfacial flows

TL;DR

This paper investigates the hydrodynamic accuracy of pseudo-potential lattice Boltzmann models in simulating interfacial flows, focusing on ligament break-up, and highlights the importance of fine-tuning to reduce spurious effects.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis of the hydrodynamic behavior of pseudo-potential LBM models near interfaces, especially during liquid ligament break-up.

Findings

Spurious currents significantly affect simulation outcomes.

Different collision operators influence the distribution of spurious currents.

Proper fine-tuning of pseudo-potential models is essential for accurate applications.

Abstract

The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is routinely employed in the simulation of complex multiphase flows comprising bulk phases separated by non-ideal interfaces. LBM is intrinsically mesoscale with an hydro-dynamic equivalence popularly set by the Chapman-Enskog analysis, requiring that fields slowly vary in space and time. The latter assumptions become questionable close to interfaces, where the method is also known to be affected by spurious non hydrodynamical contributions. This calls for quantitative hydrodynamical checks. In this paper we analyze the hydrodynamic behaviour of LBM pseudo-potential models for the problem of break-up of a liquid ligament triggered by the Plateau-Rayleigh instability. Simulations are performed at fixed interface thickness, while increasing the ligament radius, i.e. in the "sharp interface" limit. Influence of different LBM collision operators is also assessed. We find that different distributions of spurious currents along the interface may change the outcome of the pseudo-potential model simulations quite sensibly, which suggests that a proper fine-tuning of pseudo-potential models in time-dependent problems is needed before the utilization in concrete applications. Taken all together, we argue that the results of the proposed study provide a valuable insight for engineering pseudo-potential model applications involving the hydrodynamics of liquid jets.