An asymptotic preserving unified gas kinetic scheme for frequency-dependent radiative transfer equations

Abstract

This paper presents an extension of previous work (Sun et al., 2015 [22]) of the unified gas kinetic scheme (UGKS) for the gray radiative transfer equations to the frequency-dependent (multi-group) radiative transfer system. Different from the gray radiative transfer equations, where the optical opacity is only a function of local material temperature, the simulation of frequency-dependent radiative transfer is associated with additional difficulties from the frequency-dependent opacity. For the multiple frequency radiation, the opacity depends on both the spatial location and the frequency. For example, the opacity is typically a decreasing function of frequency. At the same spatial region the transport physics can be optically thick for the low frequency photons, and optically thin for high frequency ones. Therefore, the optical thickness is not a simple function of space location. In this paper, the UGKS for frequency-dependent radiative system is developed. The UGKS is a finite volume method and the transport physics is modeled according to the ratio of the cell size to the photon's frequency-dependent mean free path. When the cell size is much larger than the photon's mean free path, a diffusion solution for such a frequency radiation will be obtained. On the other hand, when the cell size is much smaller than the photon's mean free path, a free transport mechanism will be recovered. In the regime between the above two limits, with the variation of the ratio between the local cell size and photon's mean free path, the UGKS provides a smooth transition in the physical and frequency space to capture the corresponding transport physics accurately. The seemingly straightforward extension of the UGKS from the gray to multiple frequency radiation system is due to its intrinsic consistent multiple scale transport modeling, but it still involves lots of work to properly discretize the multiple groups in order to design an asymptotic preserving (AP) scheme in all regimes. The current scheme is tested in a few frequency-dependent radiation problems, and the results are compared with the solutions from the well-defined implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) method. The UGKS is much more efficient than IMC, and the computational times of both schemes for all test cases are listed. The UGKS seems to be the first discrete ordinate method (DOM) for the accurate capturing of multiple frequency radiative transport physics from ballistic particle motion to the diffusive wave propagation.