Discrete effects on boundary conditions for the lattice Boltzmann equation in simulating microscale gas flows.

The lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE) has shown its promise in the simulation of microscale gas flows. One of the critical issues with this advanced method is to specify suitable slip boundary conditions to ensure simulation accuracy. In this paper we study two widely used kinetic boundary conditions in the LBE: the combination of the bounce-back and specular-reflection scheme and the discrete Maxwell's scheme. We show that (i) both schemes are virtually equivalent in principle, and (ii) there exist discrete effects in both schemes. A strategy is then proposed to adjust the parameters in the two kinetic boundary conditions such that an accurate slip boundary condition can be implemented. The numerical results demonstrate that the corrected boundary conditions are robust and reliable.