High order asymptotic preserving discontinuous Galerkin methods for gray radiative transfer equations

Abstract

In this paper, we will develop a class of high order asymptotic preserving (AP) discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for nonlinear time-dependent gray radiative transfer equations (GRTEs). Inspired by the works in [6,55], we propose to penalize the nonlinear GRTEs under the micro-macro decomposition framework by adding a weighted linear diffusive term. A hyperbolic, namely Δt=O(h) in the transport regime where Δt and h are the time step and mesh size respectively, and unconditional stability instead of parabolic time step restriction Δt=O(h2) in the diffusive regime are obtained, which are also free from the photon mean free path. We further employ a Picard iteration with a predictor-corrector procedure, to decouple the resulting global nonlinear system to a linear system with local nonlinear algebraic equations within each outer iterative loop. For the resulting scheme, only an implicit system for the macroscopic variable needs to be solved, while the microscopic variable can be updated explicitly. Besides, the nonlinear implicit system is decoupled to a linear positive definite system followed by nonlinear algebraic equations due to the Picard iteration. Namely, high dimension, implicit treatment and nonlinearity are all decoupled. Our scheme is shown to be AP and asymptotically accurate (AA). Numerical tests for one and two spatial dimensional problems are performed to demonstrate that our scheme is high order accurate, effective and efficient.