The accuracy of moment equations as approximations of kinetic gas theory is studied for four different boundary value problems. The kinetic setting is given by the BGK equation linearized around a globally constant Maxwellian using one space dimension and a three-dimensional velocity space. The boundary value problems include Couette and Poiseuille flow as well as heat conduction between walls and heat conduction based on a locally varying heating source. The polynomial expansion of the distribution function allows for different moment theories of which two popular families are investigated in detail. Furthermore, optimal approximations for a given number of variables are studied empirically. The paper focuses on approximations with relatively low number of variables which allows to draw conclusions in particular about specific moment theories like the regularized 13-moment equations.

There exist many spatial discretization schemes that are well able to provide accurate and stable approximations for isothermal turbulent flows. Comparatively little analysis has been made of the performance of these schemes in the presence of temperature gradients driven by combustion. In this paper, the effects of temperature gradients on numerical stability are explored. A surprising result is that temperature gradients in the flow have a tendency to impinge on left half plane (LHP) stability of the spatial discretization scheme. Reasons for this tendency are explored and two remedies are proposed: one based on the particular class of finite difference schemes, and one based on an alternative method of boundary condition specification.

Extreme events play a crucial role in fluid turbulence. Inspired by methods from field theory, these extreme events, their evolution and probability can be computed with help of the instanton formalism as minimizers of a suitable action functional. Due to the high number of degrees of freedom in multi-dimensional fluid flows, traditional global minimization techniques quickly become prohibitive in their memory requirements. We outline a novel method for finding the minimizing trajectory in a wide class of problems that typically occurs in turbulence setups, where the underlying dynamical system is a non-gradient, non-linear partial differential equation, and the forcing is restricted to a limited length scale. We demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm in terms of performance and memory by computing high resolution instanton field configurations corresponding to viscous shocks for 1D and 2D compressible flows.

A three-dimensional (3D) lattice Boltzmann flux solver (LBFS) is presented in this paper for the simulation of both isothermal and thermal flows. The present solver combines the advantages of conventional Navier-Stokes (N-S) solvers and lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE) solvers. It applies the finite volume method (FVM) to solve the N-S equations. Different from the conventional N-S solvers, its viscous and inviscid fluxes at the cell interface are evaluated simultaneously by local reconstruction of LBE solution. As compared to the conventional LBE solvers, which apply the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) globally in the whole computational domain, it only applies LBM locally at each cell interface, and flow variables at cell centers are given from the solution of N-S equations. Since LBM is only applied locally in the 3D LBFS, the drawbacks of the conventional LBM, such as limitation to uniform mesh, tie-up of mesh spacing and time step, tedious implementation of boundary conditions, are completely removed. The accuracy, efficiency and stability of the proposed solver are examined in detail by simulating plane Poiseuille flow, lid-driven cavity flow and natural convection. Numerical results show that the LBFS has a second order of accuracy in space. The efficiency of the LBFS is lower than LBM on the same grids. However, the LBFS needs very less non-uniform grids to get grid-independence results and its efficiency can be greatly improved and even much higher than LBM. In addition, the LBFS is more stable and robust.

This paper deals with boundary optimal control problems for the heat and Navier-Stokes equations and addresses the issue of defining controls in function spaces which are naturally associated to the volume variables by trace restriction. For this reason we reformulate the boundary optimal control problem into a distributed problem through a lifting function approach. The stronger regularity requirements which are imposed by standard boundary control approaches can then be avoided. Furthermore, we propose a new numerical strategy that allows to solve the coupled optimality system in a robust way for a large number of unknowns. The optimality system resulting from a finite element discretization is solved by a local multigrid algorithm with domain decomposition Vanka-type smoothers. The purpose of these smoothers is to solve the optimality system implicitly over subdomains with a small number of degrees of freedom, in order to achieve robustness with respect to the regularization parameters in the cost functional. We present the results of some test cases where temperature is the observed quantity and the control quantity corresponds to the boundary values of the fluid temperature in a portion of the boundary. The control region for the observed quantity is a part of the domain where it is interesting to match a desired temperature value.

The extension of diamond scheme for diffusion equation to three dimensions is presented. The discrete normal flux is constructed by a linear combination of the directional flux along the line connecting cell-centers and the tangent flux along the cell-faces. In addition, it treats material discontinuities by a new iterative method. The stability and first-order convergence of the method is proved on distorted meshes. The numerical results illustrate that the method appears to be approximate second-order accuracy for solution.

It is well known that grid discontinuities have significant impact on the performance of finite difference schemes (FDSs). The geometric conservation law (GCL) is very important for FDSs on reducing numerical oscillations and ensuring free-stream preservation in curvilinear coordinate system. It is not quite clear how GCL works in finite difference method and how GCL errors affect spatial discretization errors especially in nonsmooth grids. In this paper, a method is developed to analyze the impact of grid discontinuities on the GCL errors and spatial discretization errors. A violation of GCL cause GCL errors which depend on grid smoothness, grid metrics method and finite difference operators. As a result there are more source terms in spatial discretization errors. The analysis shows that the spatial discretization accuracy on non-sufficiently smooth grids is determined by the discontinuity order of grids and can approach one higher order by following GCL. For sufficiently smooth grids, the spatial discretization accuracy is determined by the order of FDSs and FDSs satisfying the GCL can obtain smaller spatial discretization errors. Numerical tests have been done by the second-order and fourth-order FDSs to verify the theoretical results.

In this paper Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) has been used in order to perform Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) for porous media analysis. Among the different configurations of porous media, open cell metallic foams are gaining a key role for a large number of applications, like heat exchangers for high performance cars or aeronautic components as well. Their structure allows improving heat transfer process with fruitful advantages for packaging issues and size reduction. In order to better understand metallic foam capabilities, a random sphere generation code has been implemented and fluid-dynamic simulations have been carried out by means of a kinetic approach. After having defined a computational domain the Reynolds number influence has been studied with the aim of characterizing both pressure drop and friction factor throughout a finite foam volume. In order to validate the proposed model, a comparison analysis with experimental data has been carried out too.

In this work, we present a model for an aerosol (air/particle mixture) in the respiratory system. It consists of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for the air and the Vlasov equation for the particles in a fixed or moving domain, coupled through a drag force. We propose a discretization of the model, investigate stability properties of the numerical code and sensitivity to parameter perturbation. We also focus on the influence of the aerosol on the airflow.

We combine the Shan-Chen multicomponent lattice Boltzmann model and the link-based bounce-back particle suspension model to simulate particle motion in binary immiscible fluids. The impact of the slightly mixing nature of the Shan-Chen model and the fluid density variations near the solid surface caused by the fluid-solid interaction, on the particle motion in binary fluids is comprehensively studied. Our simulations show that existing models suffer significant fluid mass drift as the particle moves across nodes, and the obtained particle trajectories deviate away from the correct ones. A modified wetting model is then proposed to reduce the non-physical effects, and its effectiveness is validated by comparison with existing wetting models. Furthermore, the first-order refill method for the newly created lattice node combined with the new wetting model significantly improves mass conservation and accuracy.

In this paper, a computational model for the natural state of an inextensible capsule has been successfully combined with a spring model of the capsule membrane to simulate the motion of the capsule in two-dimensional shear flow. Besides the viscosity ratio of the internal fluid and external fluid of the capsule, the natural state also plays a role for having the transition between two well known motions, tumbling and tank-treading (TT) with the long axis oscillates about a fixed inclination angle (a swinging mode), when varying the shear rate. Between tumbling and tank-treading, the intermittent behavior has been obtained for the capsule with a biconcave rest shape. The estimated critical value of the swelling ratio for having the intermittent transition behavior is less than 0.7, i.e., the capsules with rest shape closer to a full disk do not have the intermittent behavior in shear flow. The intermittent dynamics of the capsule in the transition region is a mixture of tumbling and TT with a swinging mode. Just like the motion of TT with a swing mode, which can be viewed as a tank-treading with an incomplete tumbling, the membrane tank-treads backward and forward within a small range during the tumbling motion.

We describe our implementation of a parallel fast multipole method for evaluating potentials for discrete and continuous source distributions. The first requires summation over the source points and the second requiring integration over a continuous source density. Both problems require (N2) complexity when computed directly; however, can be accelerated to (N) time using FMM. In our PVFMM software library, we use kernel independent FMM and this allows us to compute potentials for a wide range of elliptic kernels. Our method is high order, adaptive and scalable. In this paper, we discuss several algorithmic improvements and performance optimizations including cache locality, vectorization, shared memory parallelism and use of coprocessors. Our distributed memory implementation uses space-filling curve for partitioning data and a hypercube communication scheme. We present convergence results for Laplace, Stokes and Helmholtz (low wavenumber) kernels for both particle and volume FMM. We measure efficiency of our method in terms of CPU cycles per unknown for different accuracies and different kernels. We also demonstrate scalability of our implementation up to several thousand processor cores on the Stampede platform at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.