Abstract
Spurious current emerging in the vicinity of phase interfaces is a well-known disadvantage of the lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE) for two-phase flows. Previous analysis shows that this unphysical phenomenon comes from the force imbalance at discrete level inherited in LBE (Guo et al 2011 Phys. Rev. E 83 036707). Based on the analysis of the LBE free of checkerboard effects, in this work we further show that the force imbalance is caused by the different discretization stencils: the implicit one from the streaming process and the explicit one from the discretization of the force term. Particularly, the total contribution includes two parts, one from the difference between the intrinsically discretized density (or ideal gas pressure) gradient and the explicit ones in the force term, and the other from the explicit discretized chemical potential gradients in the intrinsically discretized force term. The former contribution is a special feature of LBE which was not realized previously.