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Self-rewetting fluids (SRFs), such as aqueous solutions of long-chain alcohols, exhibit anomalous quadratic dependence of surface tension on temperature having a minimum and with a positive gradient. When compared to the normal fluids (NFs), the SRFs can be associated with significantly modified interfacial dynamics, which have recently been exploited to enhance flow and thermal transport in various applications (e.g., microgravity and microscale transport systems). In this work, first, we develop a new analytical solution of thermocapillary convection in superimposed two SRF layers confined within a microchannel that is sinusoidally heated on one side and maintained at a uniform temperature on the other side under the creeping flow regime. Then, a robust central moment lattice Boltzmann method using the Allen-Cahn equation for interface tracking, two-fluid motion, and the energy transport for numerical simulations of SRFs is constructed. The analytical and computational techniques are generally shown to be in good quantitative agreement with one another. Moreover, the effect of the various characteristic parameters on the magnitude and the distribution thermocapillary-driven motion is studied. The thermocapillary flow patterns in SRFs are shown to be strikingly different when compared to the NFs: For otherwise the same conditions, the SRFs result in eight periodic counterrotating thermocapillary convection rolls, while the NFs exhibit only four such vortices. Moreover, the direction of the circulating fluid motion in such vortical structures for the SRFs is found to be towards the hotter zones on the interfaces, which is opposite to that in NFs. By tuning the sensitivity coefficients of the surface tension on temperature, it is shown that the magnitude as well the overall thermocapillary flow patterns can be significantly manipulated., Comment: 55 pages, 29 figures

We present a new 3D lattice Boltzmann (LB) algorithm based on central moments for the D3Q27 lattice using a cuboid grid, which is parameterized by two grid aspect ratios that are related to the ratios of the particle speeds with respect to that along a reference coordinate direction. The use of the cuboid lattice grid enables the method to compute flows having different characteristic length scales in different directions more efficiently. It is constructed to simulate the Navier-Stokes equations consistently via introducing counteracting corrections to the second order moment equilibria obtained via a Chapman-Enskog analysis that eliminate the errors associated with the grid anisotropy and the non-Galilean invariant terms. The implementation is shown to be compact and modular, with an interpretation based on special matrices, admitting ready extension of the standard algorithm for the cubic lattice to the cuboid lattice via appropriate scaling of moments based on grid aspect ratios before and after collision step and equilibria corrections. The resulting formulation is general in that the same grid corrections developed for the D3Q27 lattice for recovering the correct viscous stress tensor is applicable for other lattice subsets, and a variety of collision models, including those based on the relaxation of raw moments, central moments and cumulants, as well as their special case involving the distribution functions. The cuboid central moment LBM is validated against a variety of benchmark flows, and when used in lieu of the corresponding raw moment formulation for simulating shear flows, we show that it results in significant improvements in numerical stability. Finally, we demonstrate that our cuboid LB approach is efficient in simulating anisotropic shear flow problems with significant savings in computational cost and memory storage when compared to that based on the cubic lattice., 60 pages, 14 figures

Cascaded lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) involves the use of central moments in a multiple relaxation time formulation in prescribing the collision step. When the goal is to simulate low Mach number stationary flows, the greater the disparity between the magnitude of fluid speed and the sound speed, the higher is the numerical stiffness, which results in relatively large number of time steps for convergence of the LBM. One way to improve the steady state convergence of the scheme is to precondition the cascaded LBM, which reduces the disparities between the characteristic speeds or equivalently those between the eigenvalues of the system. In this paper we present a new preconditioned, two-dimensional cascaded LBM, where a preconditioning parameter is introduced into the equilibrium moments as well as the forcing terms. Particular focus is given to preconditioning differently the moments due to forcing at first and second orders so as to avoid any spurious effects in the emergent macroscopic equations. A Chapman–Enskog analysis performed on this approach shows consistency to the preconditioned Navier–Stokes equations. This modified central moment based scheme is then validated for accuracy by comparison against prior analytical or numerical results for certain benchmark problems, including those involving spatially variable body forces. Finally, significant steady state convergence acceleration of the preconditioned cascaded LBM is demonstrated for a set of characteristic parameters.

A cascaded lattice Boltzmann (LB) approach based on central moments and multiple relaxation times to simulate thermal convective flows, which are driven by buoyancy forces and/or swirling effects, in the cylindrical coordinate system with axial symmetry is presented. In this regard, the dynamics of the axial and radial momentum components along with the pressure are represented by means of the 2D Navier-Stokes equations with geometric mass and momentum source terms in the pseudo Cartesian form, while the evolutions of the azimuthal momentum and the temperature field are each modeled by an advection-diffusion type equation with appropriate local source terms. Based on these, cascaded LB schemes involving three distribution functions are formulated to solve for the fluid motion in the meridian plane using a D2Q9 lattice, and to solve for the azimuthal momentum and the temperature field each using a D2Q5 lattice. The geometric mass and momentum source terms for the flow fields and the energy source term for the temperature field are included using a new symmetric operator splitting technique, via pre-collision and post-collision source steps around the cascaded collision step for each distribution function. These result in a particularly simple and compact formulation to directly represent the effect of various geometric source terms consistently in terms of changes in the appropriate zeroth and first order moments. Simulations of several complex buoyancy-driven thermal flows and including rotational effects in cylindrical geometries using the new axisymmetric cascaded LB schemes show good agreement with prior benchmark results for the structures of the velocity and thermal fields as well as the heat transfer rates given in terms of the Nusselt numbers., Comment: 49 pages,12 figures