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Numerical Study of the Properties of the Central Moment Lattice Boltzmann Method

Central moment lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is one of the more recent developments among the lattice kinetic schemes for computational fluid dynamics. A key element in this approach is the use of central moments to specify collision process and forcing, and thereby naturally maintaining Galilean invariance, an important characteristic of fluid flows. When the different central moments are relaxed at different rates like in a standard multiple relaxation time (MRT) formulation based on raw moments, it is endowed with a number of desirable physical and numerical features. Since the collision operator exhibits a cascaded structure, this approach is also known as the cascaded LBM. While the cascaded LBM has been developed sometime ago, a systematic study of its numerical properties, such as accuracy, grid convergence and stability for well defined canonical problems is lacking and the present work is intended to fulfill this need. We perform a quantitative study of the performance of the cascaded LBM for a set of benchmark problems of differing complexity, viz., Poiseuille flow, decaying Taylor-Green vortex flow and lid-driven cavity flow. We first establish its grid convergence and demonstrate second order accuracy under diffusive scaling for both the velocity field and its derivatives, i.e. components of the strain rate tensor, as well. The method is shown to quantitatively reproduce steady/unsteady analytical solutions or other numerical results with excellent accuracy. Numerical experiments further demonstrate that the central moment MRT LBM results in significant stability improvements when compared with certain existing collision models at moderate additional computational cost.