Lattice Boltzmann simulations on irregular grids: Introduction of the NATriuM library

The lattice Boltzmann method is a modern approach to simulate fluid flow. In its original formulation, it is restricted to regular grids, second-order discretizations, and a unity CFL number. This paper describes our new off-lattice Boltzmann solver NATriuM, an extensible and parallel C++ code to perform lattice Boltzmann simulations on irregular grids. NATriuM also allows high-order spatial discretizations and non-unity CFL numbers to be used. We demonstrate how these features can efficiently decrease the number of grid points required in a simulation and thus reduce the computational time, compared to the standard lattice Boltzmann method. We detail the implementation of a recently proposed semi-Lagrangian lattice Boltzmann method and prove its efficiency in comparisons to other state-of-the-art off-lattice Boltzmann schemes.