Simulation of liquid-gas-solid flows with the Lattice Boltzmann Method

The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) emerged from the field of computational fluid dynamics as an alternative to Navier-Stokes based approaches. It has since been proven to be applicable also for the simulation of free surface flows (liquid-gas flow) and particulate flows (liquid-solid flow). In the past both algorithmss for free surface flows and particulate flows have been realized that preserve the highly local nature of the LBM, thus allowing parallelization with purely local communication techniques, which is crucial for large-scale computations. Here we present a method that further extends the LBM in order to simulate particulate free surface flows (liquid-gas-solid flows). The method has been integrated into the waLBerla LBM software framework with the goal of achieving a maximal parallel efficiency. As with liquid-gas and liquid-solid lattice Boltzmann, the liquid-gas-solid method has demonstrated its parallel scalability on up to 1536 cores.