Unified gas-kinetic particle method for frequency-dependent radiation transport

Abstract

This paper proposes a unified gas-kinetic particle (UGKP) method for the frequency-dependent photon transport process. The photon transport is a typical multiscale process governed by the nonlinear radiative transfer equations (RTE). The flow regime of photon transport varies from the ballistic regime to the diffusive regime with respect to optical depth and photon frequency. The UGKP method is an asymptotic preserving (AP) scheme and a regime adaptive scheme. The teleportation error is significantly reduced, and the computational efficiency is remarkably improved in the diffusive regime. Distinguished from the standard multigroup treatment, the proposed UGKP method solves the frequency space in a non-discretized way. Therefore the Rosseland diffusion system can be precisely preserved in the optically thick regime. Taking advantage of the local integral solution of RTE, the distribution of the emitted photon can be constructed from its macroscopic moments. The Monte Carlo particles in the UGKP method need only be tracked before their first collision events, and a re-sampling process is performed to close the photon distribution for each time step. The high computational cost of calculating excessive scattering events can be saved, especially in the optically thick regime. The proposed UGKP method is implicit and removes the light speed constraint on the time step. The particle tracking approach combining the implicit formulation makes the proposed UGKP method an efficient solution algorithm for frequency-dependent radiative transfer problems. We demonstrate with numerical examples the capability of the proposed multi-frequency UGKP method.