Lattice boltzmann method simulation of aeroacoustics and nonreflecting boundary conditions

A lattice Boltzmann method that can recover the first coefficient of viscosity and the specific heat ratio correctly has been adopted for one-step aeroacoustic simulations because it can recover the speed of sound correctly. Instead of solving the Navier-Stokes equations as in the case of direct numerical simulation, the lattice Boltzmann method only needs to solve one transport equation for the collision function. Other flow properties are obtained by integrating this collision function over the particle velocity space. The lattice Boltzmann method is effective only if appropriate nonreflecting boundary conditions for open computational boundaries are available, just like the direct numerical simulation. Four different nonreflecting boundary conditions are commonly used with direct numerical simulation for one-step aeroacoustic simulations. Among these are the characteristics-based method, the perfectly matched layer method, the C1continuous method, and the absorbing layer method. Not all nonreflecting boundary conditions are applicable when used with the lattice Boltzmann method; some might not be appropriate, whereas others could be rather effective. This paper examines some existing nonreflecting boundary conditions plus other new proposals, their appropriateness, and their suitability for the lattice Boltzmann method. The assessment is made against two classic aeroacoustic problems: propagation of a plane pressure pulse and propagation of acoustic, entropy, and vortex pulses in a uniform stream. A reference solution is obtained using direct numerical simulation assuming a relatively large computational domain without any specified nonreflecting boundary conditions. The results, obtained with a computational domain half the size of that used for the direct numerical simulation calculations, show that the absorbing layer method and the extrapolation method with assumed filter perform the best.