Effect of the forcing term in the pseudopotential lattice Boltzmann modeling of thermal flows

The pseudopotential lattice Boltzmann (LB) model is a popular model in the LB community for simulating multiphase flows. Recently, several thermal LB models, which are based on the pseudopotential LB model and constructed within the framework of the double-distribution-function LB method, were proposed to simulate thermal multiphase flows [G. Házi and A. Márkus, Phys. Rev. E 77, 026305 (2008); L. Biferale, P. Perlekar, M. Sbragaglia, and F. Toschi, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 104502 (2012); S. Gong and P. Cheng, Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer 55, 4923 (2012); M. R. Kamali et al., Phys. Rev. E 88, 033302 (2013)]. The objective of the present paper is to show that the effect of the forcing term on the temperature equation must be eliminated in the pseudopotential LB modeling of thermal flows. First, the effect of the forcing term on the temperature equation is shown via the Chapman-Enskog analysis. For comparison, alternative treatments that are free from the forcing-term effect are provided. Subsequently, numerical investigations are performed for two benchmark tests. The numerical results clearly show that the existence of the forcing-term effect will lead to significant numerical errors in the pseudopotential LB modeling of thermal flows.