Pressure (density) and velocity boundary conditions inside a flow domain are studied for 2-D and 3-D lattice Boltzmann BGK models (LBGK) and a new method to specify these conditions are proposed. These conditions are constructed in consistency of the wall boundary condition based on an idea of bounceback of non-equilibrium distribution. When these conditions are used together with the improved incompressible LBGK model [1], the simulation results recover the analytical solution of the plane Poiseuille flow driven by pressure (density) difference with machine accuracy. Since the half-way wall bounceback boundary condition is very easy to implement and was shown theoretically to give second-order accuracy for 2-D Poiseuille flow with forcing, it is used with pressure (density) inlet/outlet conditions proposed in this paper and in [2] to study the 2-D Poiseuille flow and the 3-D square duct flow. The numerical results are approximately second-order accurate. The magnitude of the error of the half-way wall bounceback is comparable with that using some other published boundary conditions. Besides, the bounceback condition has a much better stability behavior than that of other boundary conditions.

A detailed analysis is presented to demonstrate the capabilities of the lattice Boltzmann method. Thorough comparisons with other numerical solutions for the two-dimensional, driven cavity flow show that the lattice Boltzmann method gives accurate results over a wide range of Reynolds numbers. Studies of errors and convergence rates are carried out. Compressibility effects are quantified for different maximum velocities, and parameter ranges are found for stable simulations. The paper's objective is to stimulate further work using this relatively new approach for applied engineering problems in transport phenomena utilizing parallel computers.

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