Space-Angle Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method for Radiative Transfer Equation

Radiative transfer theory describes the interaction of radiation with scattering and absorbing media. It has applications in neutron transport, atmospheric physics, heat transfer, molecular imaging, and others. In steady state, the radiative transfer equation is an integro-differential equation of five independent variables, which are 3 dimensions in space and 2 dimensions in the angular direction. This high dimensionality and the presence of the integral term present serious challenges when solving the equation numerically. Over the past 50 years, several techniques for solving the radiative transfer equation (RTE) have been introduced. These include, but are certainly not limited to, Monte Carlo methods, discrete-ordinate methods, spherical harmonics methods, spectral methods, finite difference methods, and finite element methods. Methods involving discrete ordinates and spherical harmonics have received particular attention in the literature.

This work introduces a parallel space-angle discontinuous Galerkin (saDG) method to solve the steady-state RTEs. The objective-oriented design of the software allowed us to apply the saDG approach to a variety of RTEs with considerable ease, including 1x1s, 1x2s, and 2x2s. The direct solver can achieve high-order accuracy solutions for low-dimensional problems. However, for high-dimensional problems, the direct solver is time-consuming and requires significant memory usage that may exceed the computer's RAM capacity. To address this issue, we employed the Angular Decomposition (AD) method in the iterative solver, which improves runtime efficiency and reduces memory usage. To handle large-scale problems, we developed a parallel solver based on AD and Domain Decomposition (DD) methods. Finally, we applied Reflective Boundary Conditions to 2-D Cartesian radiative transfer problems.