Nonequilibrium scheme for computing the flux of the convection-diffusion equation in the framework of the lattice Boltzmann method

In this paper, we propose a local nonequilibrium scheme for computing the flux of the convection-diffusion equation with a source term in the framework of the multiple-relaxation-time (MRT) lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). Both the Chapman-Enskog analysis and the numerical results show that, at the diffusive scaling, the present nonequilibrium scheme has a second-order convergence rate in space. A comparison between the nonequilibrium scheme and the conventional second-order central-difference scheme indicates that, although both schemes have a second-order convergence rate in space, the present nonequilibrium scheme is more accurate than the central-difference scheme. In addition, the flux computation rendered by the present scheme also preserves the parallel computation feature of the LBM, making the scheme more efficient than conventional finite-difference schemes in the study of large-scale problems. Finally, a comparison between the single-relaxation-time model and the MRT model is also conducted, and the results show that the MRT model is more accurate than the single-relaxation-time model, both in solving the convection-diffusion equation and in computing the flux.