Convection-diffusion lattice Boltzmann scheme for irregular lattices

In this paper, a lattice Boltzmann (LB) scheme for convection diffusion on irregular lattices is presented, which is free of any interpolation or coarse graining step. The scheme is derived using the axioma that the velocity moments of the equilibrium distribution equal those of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. The axioma holds for both Bravais and irregular lattices, implying a single framework for LB schemes for all lattice types. By solving benchmark problems we have shown that the scheme is indeed consistent with convection diffusion. Furthermore, we have compared the performance of the LB schemes with that of finite difference and finite element schemes. The comparison shows that the LB scheme has a similar performance as the one-step second-order Lax-Wendroff scheme: it has little numerical diffusion, but has a slight dispersion error. By changing the relaxation parameter omega the dispersion error can be balanced by a small increase of the numerical diffusion. (C) 2000 Academic Press.