Simulation of Heat Transfer With LBM and Lagrangian Methods for Microfluidic Applications

This work presents a Lagrangian approach to simulate convective heat transfer in small scales. The fully developed flow field, simulated by a Lattice Boltzmann Method, is combined with Lagrangian tracking of thermal markers to determine the behavior of an instantaneous scalar line source located at the wall of a channel. The resulting probability density functions are used to calculate the behavior of continuous line sources of heat at the wall of the channel, as well as the temperature for the case of constant temperature or constant heat flux from the wall. This method is resourceful in terms of computational efficiency, in that it can be used to simulate various thermal boundary conditions and Prandtl number fluids with a single flow field resulting from a Lattice Boltzmann simulation.