Meshless lattice Boltzmann method for the simulation of fluid flows.

A meshless lattice Boltzmann numerical method is proposed. The collision and streaming operators of the lattice Boltzmann equation are separated, as in the usual lattice Boltzmann models. While the purely local collision equation remains the same, we rewrite the streaming equation as a pure advection equation and discretize the resulting partial differential equation using the Lax-Wendroff scheme in time and the meshless local Petrov-Galerkin scheme based on augmented radial basis functions in space. The meshless feature of the proposed method makes it a more powerful lattice Boltzmann solver, especially for cases in which using meshes introduces significant numerical errors into the solution, or when improving the mesh quality is a complex and time-consuming process. Three well-known benchmark fluid flow problems, namely the plane Couette flow, the circular Couette flow, and the impulsively started cylinder flow, are simulated for the validation of the proposed method. Excellent agreement with analytical solutions or with previous experimental and numerical results in the literature is observed in all the simulations. Although the computational resources required for the meshless method per node are higher compared to that of the standard lattice Boltzmann method, it is shown that for cases in which the total number of nodes is significantly reduced, the present method actually outperforms the standard lattice Boltzmann method.