Multidimensional fully adaptive lattice Boltzmann methods with error control based on multiresolution analysis

Lattice-Boltzmann methods are known for their simplicity, efficiency and ease of parallelization, usually relying on uniform Cartesian meshes with a strong bond between spatial and temporal discretization. This fact complicates the crucial issue of reducing the computational cost and the memory impact by automatically coarsening the grid where a fine mesh is unnecessary, still ensuring the overall quality of the numerical solution through error control. This work provides a possible answer to this interesting question, by connecting, for the first time, the field of lattice-Boltzmann Methods (LBM) to the adaptive multiresolution (MR) approach based on wavelets. To this end, we employ a MR multi-scale transform to adapt the mesh as the solution evolves in time according to its local regularity. The collision phase is not affected due to its inherent local nature and because we do not modify the speed of the sound, contrarily to most of the LBM/Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) strategies proposed in the literature, thus preserving the original structure of any LBM scheme. Besides, an original use of the MR allows the scheme to resolve the proper physics by efficiently controlling the accuracy of the transport phase. We carefully test our method to conclude on its adaptability to a wide family of existing lattice Boltzmann schemes, treating both hyperbolic and parabolic systems of equations, thus being less problem-dependent than the AMR approaches, which have a hard time guaranteeing an effective control on the error. The ability of the method to yield a very efficient compression rate and thus a computational cost reduction for solutions involving localized structures with loss of regularity is also shown, while guaranteeing a precise control on the approximation error introduced by the spatial adaptation of the grid. The numerical strategy is implemented on a specific open-source platform called SAMURAI with a dedicated data-structure relying on set algebra. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.