Explicit and viscosity-independent immersed-boundary scheme for the lattice Boltzmann method

Viscosity independence of lattice-Boltzmann methods is a crucial issue to ensure the physical relevancy of the predicted macroscopic flows over large ranges of physical parameters. The immersed-boundary (IB) method, a powerful tool that allows one to immerse arbitrary-shaped, moving, and deformable bodies in the flow, suffers from a boundary-slip error that increases as a function of the fluid viscosity, substantially limiting its range of application. In addition, low fluid viscosities may result in spurious oscillations of the macroscopic quantities in the vicinity of the immersed boundary. In this work, it is shown mathematically that the standard IB method is indeed not able to reproduce the scaling properties of the macroscopic solution, leading to a viscosity-related error on the computed IB force. The analysis allows us to propose a simple correction of the IB scheme that is local, straightforward and does not involve additional computational time. The derived method is implemented in a two-relaxation-time D2Q9 lattice-Boltzmann solver, applied to several physical configurations, namely, the Poiseuille flow, the flow around a cylinder towed in still fluid, and the flow around a cylinder oscillating in still fluid, and compared to a noncorrected immersed-boundary method. The proposed correction leads to a major improvement of the viscosity independence of the solver over a wide range of relaxation times (from 0.5001 to 50), including the correction of the boundary-slip error and the suppression of the spurious oscillations. This improvement may considerably extend the range of application of the IB lattice-Boltzmann method, in particular providing a robust tool for the numerical analysis of physical problems involving fluids of varying viscosity interacting with solid geometries.