An angular multigrid preconditioner for the radiation transport equation with Fokker–Planck scattering

Danny Lathouwers*, Zoltán Perkó

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)
29 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

In a previous paper (Hennink and Lathouwers, 2017) we developed a finite element discretization for the Boltzmann transport equation with forward peaked scatter modeled by the Fokker–Planck approximation. The discretization was based on the discontinuous Galerkin method in both space and angle. It was expected and found that the regular source iteration algorithm for the Boltzmann equation is not effective in solving the discretized system and becomes excessively expensive for problems with many angular degrees of freedom. The purpose of this paper is to develop a multigrid scheme as preconditioner for the above mentioned discretization. The method exploits the nested nature of the meshes and the natural prolongation/restriction between meshes by Galerkin projection. A set of test problems ranging from pure spherical diffusion to the complete Boltzmann transport problem in 3D are presented to illustrate that the method is very effective, resulting in iteration counts nearly independent of problem size even for highly non-isotropically refined angular meshes.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)165-177
JournalJournal of Computational and Applied Mathematics
Volume350
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Discontinuous Galerkin
  • Fokker–Planck
  • Interior penalty
  • Multigrid
  • Particle transport
  • Radiation transport

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