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arXiv · 2509.10066

Perfectly transparent boundary conditions and wave propagation in lattice Boltzmann schemes

Thomas Bellotti
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Abstract

Systems of N = 1, 2, . . . first-order hyperbolic conservation laws feature N undamped waves propagating at finite speeds. On their own hand, multi-step Finite Difference and lattice Boltzmann schemes with q = N + 1, N + 2, . . . unknowns involve N ''physical'' waves, which are aimed at being as closely-looking as possible to the ones of the PDEs, and q-N ''numerical-spurious-parasitic'' waves, which are subject to their own speed of propagation, and either damped or undamped. The whole picture is even more complicated in the discrete setting-as numerical schemes act as dispersive media, thus propagate different harmonics at different phase (and group) velocities. For compelling practical reasons, simulations must always be conducted on bounded domains, even when the target problem is unbounded in space. The importance of transparent boundary conditions, preventing artificial boundaries from acting as mirrors producing polluting ricochets, naturally follows. This work presents, building on Besse, Coulombel, and Noble [ESAIM: M2AN, 55 (2021)], a systematic way of developing perfectly transparent boundary conditions for lattice Boltzmann schemes tackling linear problems in one and two space dimensions. Our boundary conditions are ''perfectly'' transparent, at least for 1D problems, as they absorb both physical and spurious waves regardless of their frequency. After presenting, in a simple framework, several approaches to handle the fact that q > N , we elect the so-called ''scalar'' approach (which despite its name, also works when N > 1) as method of choice for more involved problems. This method solely relies on computing the coefficients of the Laurent series at infinity of the roots of the dispersion relation of the bulk scheme. We insist on asymptotics for these coefficients in the spirit of analytic combinatorics. The reason is two-fold: asymptotics guide truncation of boundary conditions to make them depending on a fixed number of past time-steps, and make it clearduring the process of computing coefficients-whether intermediate quantities can be safely stored using floating-point arithmetic or not. Numerous numerical investigations in 1D and 2D with N = 1 and 2 are carried out, and show the effectiveness of the proposed boundary conditions.

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Thomas Bellotti. 2026-02-10. Perfectly transparent boundary conditions and wave propagation in lattice Boltzmann schemes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10066

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