Calibration of lubrication force measurements by lattice Boltzmann simulations

Many experiments explore the hydrodynamic boundary of a surface by approaching a colloidal sphere and measuring the occurring lubrication force. However, in this case many different parameters like wettability and surface roughness influence the result. In the experiment these cannot be separated easily. For a deeper understanding of such surface effects a tool is required that predicts the influence of different surface properties. Here computer simulations can help. In this paper we present lattice Boltzmann simulations of a sphere submerged in a Newtonian liquid and show that our method is able to reproduce the theoretical predictions. In order to provide high precision simulation results the influence of finite size effects has to be controlled. We study the influence of the required system size and resolution of the sphere and demonstrate that already moderate computing resources allow to keep the error below 1%