Wall orientation and shear stress in the lattice Boltzmann model

The wall shear stress is a quantity of profound importance for clinical diagnosis of artery diseases. The lattice Boltzmann is an easily parallelizable numerical method of solving the flow problems, but it suffers from errors of the wall shear stress near a non-smooth wall. In this work we present a simple formula to calculate the wall shear stress in the lattice Boltzmann model and propose to compute wall normals, which are necessary to compute the wall shear stress, by taking the weighted mean over boundary facets lying in a vicinity of a wall element. We carry out several tests and observe an increase of accuracy of computed normal vectors over other methods in two and three dimensions. Using the scheme we compute the wall shear stress in an inclined and bent channel fluid flow and show a minor influence of the normal on the numerical error, implying that the main error arises because the velocity vectors near the wall follow the shape of the staircase. Finally, we calculate the wall shear stress in the human abdominal aorta in steady conditions using our method and compare the results with a standard finite volume solver and experimental data available in the literature. Applications of our ideas in a simplified protocol for data preprocessing in medical applications are discussed.

► A new formula for the wall shear stress in the lattice Boltzmann model is proposed. ► A new procedure for computing normal vectors from the geometry is proposed. ► Both formulas are verified against analytical equations in channel flows. ► We compute the wall shear stress in patient-specific human abdominal aorta. ► We show a very good agreement of our results with a finite volume solver.