Conservative local grid refinement for the vectorial lattice Boltzmann method

Abstract

We present a conservative local grid-refinement coupling for the vectorial lattice Boltzmann method (VLBM), a kinetic-type scheme for hyperbolic conservation laws in which each conserved field is carried by its own population rather than by moment truncation of a Maxwellian. Coarse and fine regions share a common link speed and are advanced with different time steps, sub-cycled at a fixed ratio; a mean-preserving reconstruction in time supplies the missing coarse-to-fine boundary data, and a matched, Berger--Colella-style reflux returns the fine-to-coarse data, together conserving mass, momentum, and energy exactly, independent of the equation of state, the local relaxation parameter, or the time step. In addition, we propose an adaptive mesh refinement extension through a conservative pair of splitting and merging operators that require no modification to the underlying coupling. The approach is validated on a sequence of increasingly demanding two-dimensional cases, in every case recovering exact conservation and the expected accuracy gains over an equivalent uniform grid.