A REVIEW OF LATTICE BOLTZMANN METHOD COMPUTATIONAL DOMAINS FOR MICRO- AND NANOREGIME APPLICATIONS

In the last two decades, microscale and nanoscale devices have received much interest due to the inevitable performance and their numerous applications not only in the field of fluid flow and heat transfer but also in bio-technology, bio-medical engineering, etc. In many situations, besides the conventional experiments and theoretical analysis, computations have emerged as a valuable tool for investigating the fluid transport and heat transfer phenomena. The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) has emerged as an important option for micro- and nanoscale devices due to the fact that the LBM is well established for the range of Knudsen number. A comparative study on several working fluids used in the field of micro- and nanodevices such as microchannel, micro-cavity, microboiling, and nanochannel is categorized. Various aspects of nanofluids used in natural convection with different cavity configurations, flow boiling, immiscible fluids, liquid-vapor phase change are also critically reviewed. Different remarks and findings of available numerical results with several investigated parameters were summarized.