  The lattice Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (LBGK) model has become the most popular
one in the lattice Boltzmann method for simulating the convection heat transfer
in porous media. However, the LBGK model generally suffers from numerical
instability at low fluid viscosities and effective thermal diffusivities. In
this paper, a modified LBGK model is developed for incompressible thermal flows
in porous media at the representative elementary volume scale, in which the
shear rate and temperature gradient are incorporated into the equilibrium
distribution functions. With two additional parameters, the relaxation times in
the collision process can be fixed at a proper value invariable to the
viscosity and the effective thermal diffusivity. In addition, by constructing a
modified equilibrium distribution function and a source term in the evolution
equation of temperature field, the present model can recover the macroscopic
equations correctly through the Chapman-Enskog analysis, which is another key
point different from previous LBGK models. Several benchmark problems are
simulated to validate the present model with the proposed local computing
scheme for the shear rate and temperature gradient, and the numerical results
agree well with analytical solutions and/or those well-documented data in
previous studies. It is also shown that the present model and the computational
schemes for the gradient operators have a second-order accuracy in space, and
better numerical stability of the present modified LBGK model than previous
LBGK models is demonstrated.
