[doop]

Off the top of my head (it's quite a while..), lattice gas models wind up giving you a velocity-dependent viscosity, i.e. the viscosity of the fluid is a function of how fast it is travelling relative to the lattice. This is unphysical to say the least: while I think you can apply some sort of rescaling to alleviate it, it doesn't make it any easier to get to high Reynolds number flows: that and the huge amount of averaging make lattice gas rather impractical compared to later methods.

> Also, which continuum are you referring to here? Number of particles? Lattice spacing?

By continuum I mean you write down the continuum Boltzmann equation, i.e. a partial differential equation for the evolution of the single particle distribution function. You can then discretize this onto a lattice to recover the lattice Boltzmann method.

[taliesinb]

Lattice Boltzmann have these same weaknesses (whether one cares as you say depends on the Reynolds regime). Point is, starting from the "simplest possible gas program" has yielded a useful branch of CFD, and one would have thought it extremely unlikely to work if you used intuition from traditional mathematics... It's as discrete and analytically intractable as you get.

Anyway, to me, the continued application of these methods is one data point that NKS-like methods are proving useful across a variety of domains.

[doop]

Err, no it doesn't - the viscosity in LB is a function purely of the relaxation time (for LBGK anyway). Nor do you need to do any simulation repeats to average out the noise. The main weakness of LB is that it's not as numerically stable as a lattice gas method.

[taliesinb]

Ooops -- just saw this! My mistake!