Stabilized lattice Boltzmann-Enskog method for compressible flows and its application to one- and two-component fluids in nanochannels

A numerically stable method to solve the discretized Boltzmann-Enskog equation describing the behavior of nonideal fluids under inhomogeneous conditions is presented. The algorithm employed uses a Lagrangian finite-difference scheme for the treatment of the convective term and a forcing term to account for the molecular repulsion together with a Bhatnagar-Gross- Krook relaxation term. In order to eliminate the spurious currents induced by the numerical discretization procedure, we use a trapezoidal rule for the time integration together with a version of the two-distribution method of He. Numerical tests show that, in the case of a one-component fluid in the presence of a spherical potential well, the proposed method reduces the numerical error by several orders of magnitude. We conduct another test by considering the flow of a two-component fluid in a channel with a bottleneck and provide information about the density and velocity field in this structured geometry. © 2012 American Physical Society.