A Priori Error Estimates and Computational Studies for a Fermi Pencil-Beam Equation

Abstract

We derive a priori error estimates for the standard Galerkin and streamline diffusion finite element methods for the Fermi pencil-beam equation obtained from a fully three-dimensional Fokker–Planck equation in space and velocity variables. For a constant transport cross-section, there is a closed form analytic solution available for the Fermi equation with a data as product of Dirac functions. Our objective is to study the case of nonconstant, nonincreasing transport cross-section. Therefore we start with a theoretical, that is, a priori, error analysis for a Fermi model with modified initial data in L2. Then we construct semi-streamline-diffusion and characteristic streamline-diffusion schemes and consider an adaptive algorithm for local mesh refinements. To derive the stability estimates, for simplicity, we rely on the assumption of nonincreasing transport cross-section. Different numerical examples, in two space dimensions are justifying the theoretical results. Implementations show significant reduction of the computational error by using such adaptive procedure.