Abstract
In this paper, the multi relaxation time (MRT) lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE) was used to compute lid driven cavity flows at different Reynolds numbers (100-7500) and cavity aspect ratios (1-4 cavity width depth). Steady solutions were obtained for square cavity flows, however for deep cavity flows at 1.5 and 4 cavity width depth, unsteady solutions prevail at Re. =7500, where periodic flow exists manifested by the rapid changes of the shapes and locations of the corner vortices in strong contrast of the stationary primary vortex. The merger of the bottom corner vortices into a primary vortex and the reemergence of the corner vortices as the Reynolds number increases are more evident for the deep cavity flows. For the four cavity width depth cavity, four primary vortices were predicted by MRT model for Reynolds number beyond 1000, which were not predicted by previous single relaxation time (SRT) BGK LBE model, and this was verified by complementary Navier-Stokes simulations. Also, MRT model is more suitable for parallel computations than its BGK counterpart, due to the more intense local computations of the multi relaxation time procedure. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.