Non-orthogonal multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann method for incompressible thermal flows

In this paper, a non-orthogonal multiple-relaxation-time (MRT) lattice Boltzmann (LB) method for simulating incompressible thermal flows is presented. In the method, the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and temperature equation are solved separately by two different MRT-LB equations, which are developed based on non-orthogonal basis vectors obtained from the combinations of the lattice velocity components. The macroscopic governing equations of incompressible thermal flows can be recovered from the method through the Chapman-Enskog analysis in the incompressible limit. Numerical simulations of several typical two-dimensional problems are carried out to validate the proposed method. It is found that the present results are in good agreement with the analytical solutions and/or other numerical results reported in the literature. Furthermore, the non-orthogonal MRT-LB model shows better numerical stability in comparison with the BGK-LB model, and the grid convergence tests indicate that the present MRT-LB method has a second-order convergence rate in space. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.