Our recently developed lattice Boltzmann model is used to simulate droplet dynamical behaviour governed by thermocapillary force in microchannels. One key research challenge for developing droplet-based microfluidic systems is control of droplet motion and its dynamic behaviour. We numerically demonstrate that the thermocapillary force can be exploited for microdroplet manipulations including synchronisation, sorting, and splitting. This work indicates that the lattice Boltzmann method provides a promising design simulation tool for developing complex droplet-based microfluidic devices.

Accurate simulations of high-speed rarefied flows present many physical and computational challenges. Toward this end, the present work extends the Unified Gas Kinetic Scheme (UGKS) to a wider range of Mach and Knudsen numbers by implementing WENO (Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory) interpolation. Then the UGKS is employed to simulate the canonical problem of lid-driven cavity flow at high speeds. Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) computations are also performed when appropriate for comparison. The effect of aspect ratio, Knudsen number and Mach number on cavity flow physics is examined leading to important insight.

Amid the recent interest in the role of membrane viscosity in the deformation of a fluid-filled capsule, we consider the role of various capsule properties (shear elasticity, membrane bending stiffness and viscosity) in determining the response and recovery times of a spherical capsule in shear flow. These times are determined by fitting exponential functions to results for the Taylor deformation parameter Dxy. We focus on the relationship between the membrane and fluid viscosity ratios, as suggested by Diaz et al, and whether adjustments to the fluid viscosity ratio may be used to approximate the effects of membrane viscosity. Based on its ability to reproduce response and recovery times, our results suggest that such an approach holds promise.

We show that a single particle distribution for the “energy-conserving” D2Q13 lattice Boltzmann scheme can simulate coupled effects involving advection and diffusion of velocity and temperature. We consider various test cases: non-linear waves with periodic boundary conditions, a test case with buoyancy, propagation of transverse waves, Couette and Poiseuille flows. We test various boundary conditions and propose to mix bounce-back and anti-bounce-back numerical boundary conditions to take into account velocity and temperature Dirichlet conditions. We present also first results for the de Vahl Davis heated cavity. Our results are compared with the coupled D2Q9-D2Q5 lattice Boltzmann approach for the Boussinesq system and with an elementary finite differences solver for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. Our main experimental result is the loss of symmetry in the de Vahl Davis cavity computed with the single D2Q13 lattice Boltzmann model without the Boussinesq hypothesis. This result is confirmed by a direct Navier Stokes simulation with finite differences.

We investigate unidirectional rarefied flows confined between two infinite parallel plates with specified heat flux boundary conditions. Both Couette and force-driven Poiseuille flows are considered. The flow behaviors are analyzed numerically by solving the Shakhov model of the Boltzmann equation. We find that a zero-heat-flux wall can significantly influence the flow behavior, including the velocity slip and temperature jump at the wall, especially for high-speed flows. The predicted bimodal-like temperature profile for force-driven flows cannot even be qualitatively captured by the Navier-Stokes-Fourier equations.

A new solver is developed to numerically simulate the melting phase change with natural convection. This solver was implemented on a single Nvidia GPU based on the CUDA technology in order to simulate the melting phase change in a 2D rectangular enclosure. The Rayleigh number is of the order of magnitude of 108 and Prandlt is 50. The hybrid thermal lattice Boltzmann method (HTLBM) is employed to simulate the natural convection in the liquid phase, and the enthalpy formulation is used to simulate the phase change aspect. The model is validated by experimental data and published analytic results. The simulation results manifest a strong convection in the melted phase and a different flow pattern from the reference results with low Rayleigh number. In addition, the computational performance is estimated for single precision arithmetic, and this solver yields 703.31MLUPS and 61.89GB/s device to device data throughput on a Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPU.

Combining asymptotic analysis and weighted L2 stability estimates, the convergence of lattice Boltzmann methods for the approximation of 1D convection-diffusion-reaction equations is proved. Unlike previous approaches, the proof does not require transformations to equivalent macroscopic equations.

This paper presents a fast surface voxelization technique for the mapping of tessellated triangular surface meshes to uniform and structured grids that provide a basis for CFD simulations with the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). The core algorithm is optimized for massively parallel execution on graphics processing units (GPUs) and is based on a unique dissection of the inner body shell. This unique definition necessitates a topology based neighbor search as a preprocessing step, but also enables parallel implementation. More specifically, normal vectors of adjacent triangular tessellations are used to construct half-angles that clearly separate the per-triangle regions. For each triangle, the grid nodes inside the axis-aligned bounding box (AABB) are tested for their distance to the triangle in question and for certain well-defined relative angles. The performance of the presented grid generation procedure is superior to the performance of the GPU-accelerated flow field computations per time step which allows efficient fluid-structure interaction simulations, without noticeable performance loss due to the dynamic grid update.

The immersed boundary method (IBM) has been popular in simulating fluid structure interaction (FSI) problems involving flexible structures, and the recent introduction of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) into the IBM makes the method more versatile. In order to test the coupling characteristics of the IBM with the multiple-relaxation-time LBM (MRT-LBM), the three-dimensional (3D) balloon dynamics, including inflation, release and breach processes, are simulated. In this paper, some key issues in the coupling scheme, including the discretization of 3D boundary surfaces, the calculation of boundary force density, and the introduction of external force into the LBM, are described. The good volume conservation and pressure retention properties are verified by two 3D cases. Finally, the three FSI processes of a 3D balloon dynamics are simulated. The large boundary deformation and oscillation, obvious elastic wave propagation, sudden stress release at free edge, and recoil phenomena are all observed. It is evident that the coupling scheme of the IBM and MRT-LBM can handle complicated 3D FSI problems involving large deformation and large pressure gradients with very good accuracy and stability.

This paper presents a numerical and experimental study on hydrodynamic behavior of thin liquid films in rectangular domains. Three-dimensional computer simulations were performed using the lattice Boltzmann equation method (LBM). The liquid films laying on solid and liquid substrates are considered. The rupture of liquid films in computations is initiated via the thermocapillary (Marangoni) effect by applying an initial spatially localized temperature perturbation. The rupture scenario is found to depend on the shape of the temperature distribution and on the wettability of the solid substrate. For a wettable solid substrate, complete rupture does not occur: a residual thin liquid film remains at the substrate in the region of pseudo-rupture. For a non-wettable solid substrate, a sharp-peaked axisymmetric temperature distribution induces the rupture at the center of symmetry where the temperature is maximal. Axisymmetric temperature distribution with a flat-peaked temperature profile initiates rupture of the liquid film along a circle at some distance from the center of symmetry. The outer boundary of the rupture expands, while the inner liquid disk transforms into a toroidal figure and ultimately into an oscillating droplet.

We also apply the LBM to simulations of an evolution of one or two holes in liquid films for two-layer systems of immiscible fluids in a rectangular cell. The computed patterns are successfully compared against the results of experimental visualizations. Both the experiments and the simulations demonstrate that the initially circular holes evolved in the rectangular cell undergoing drastic changes of their shape under the effects of the surface tension and gravity. In the case of two interacting holes, the disruption of the liquid bridge separating two holes is experimentally observed and numerically simulated.

An entropy stable fully discrete shock capturing space-time Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method was proposed in a recent paper to approximate hyperbolic systems of conservation laws. This numerical scheme involves the solution of a very large nonlinear system of algebraic equations, by a Newton-Krylov method, at every time step. In this paper, we design efficient preconditioners for the large, non-symmetric linear system, that needs to be solved at every Newton step. Two sets of preconditioners, one of the block Jacobi and another of the block Gauss-Seidel type are designed. Fourier analysis of the preconditioners reveals their robustness and a large number of numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the gain in efficiency that results from preconditioning. The resulting method is employed to compute approximate solutions of the compressible Euler equations, even for very high CFL numbers.

This paper concerns the analytic structure of the self-consistent field theory (SCFT) energy functional of multicomponent block copolymer systems which contain more than two chemically distinct blocks. The SCFT has enjoyed considered success and wide usage in investigation of the complex phase behavior of block copolymers. It is well-known that the physical solutions of the SCFT equations are saddle points, however, the analytic structure of the SCFT energy functional has received little attention over the years. A recent work by Fredrickson and collaborators [see the monograph by Fredrickson, The Equilibrium Theory of Inhomogeneous Polymers, (2006), pp. 203–209] has analysed the mathematical structure of the field energy functional for polymeric systems, and clarified the index-1 saddle point nature of the problem caused by the incompressible constraint. In this paper, our goals are to draw further attention to multicomponent block copolymers utilizing the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation used by Fredrickson and co-workers. We firstly show that the saddle point character of the SCFT energy functional of multicomponent block copolymer systems may be high index, not only produced by the incompressible constraint, but also by the Flory-Huggins interaction parameters. Our analysis will be beneficial to many theoretical studies, such as the nucleation theory of ordered phases, the mesoscopic dynamics. As an application, we utilize the discovery to develop the gradient-based iterative schemes to solve the SCFT equations, and illustrate its performance through several numerical experiments taking ABC star triblock copolymers as an example.