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

Abstract

The multi-frequency radiation transport equation (RTE) system models the photon transport and the energy exchange process between the background material and different frequency photons. In this paper, the unified gas-kinetic wave-particle (UGKWP) method for multi-frequency RTE is developed to capture the multiscale non-equilibrium transport in different optical regimes. In the UGKWP, a multiscale evolution process is properly designed to obtain both non-equilibrium transport in the optically thin regime and thermal diffusion process in the optically thick regime automatically. At the same time, the coupled macroscopic energy equations for the photon and material are solved implicitly by the matrix-free source iteration method. With the wave-particle decomposition strategy, the UGKWP method has a dynamic adaptivity for different regime physics. In the optically thick regime, no particles will be sampled in the computational domain due to the intensive energy exchange between photon and background material, and the thermal diffusion solution for the photon transport will be recovered. While in the optically thin regime, stochastic particles will play a dominant role in the evolution and the non-equilibrium free transport of photon is automatically followed. In the frequency-dependent transport, the frequency carried by the simulating particle will be determined by a linear-frequency sampling strategy. In addition, to better resolve the sharp transition of opacity in the photon transport across a cell interface, the free streaming time of simulating particle in the UGKWP method will be reset when it passes through the interface. Moreover, the numerical relaxation time is properly defined to increase the particle proportion in the sharp opacity transition region in order to avoid numerical oscillation. Several typical test cases for the RTE system have been calculated to demonstrate the accuracy and reliability of the current frequency-dependent UGKWP method.