Saturday, 11 September 2010: 14:30-15:15

Dr. Hao Gao, UC Los Angeles

We have developed a fast solver of the radiative transfer equation (RTE) with the goal of solving real problems with a practical computational burden. We use a local angular discretization by triangulating the octahedron enclosed in the sphere instead of using spherical harmonics expansions. With this local angular representation, anisotropic scattering and reflection boundary conditions can be handled easily. On the other hand, the discontinuous Galerkin method is used to discretize the spatial variables in order to mimic the transport behavior of RTE. We will also describe how to accelerate convergence to the RTE solution through multigrid methods in both angle and space and .present error estimate results on the convergence of the solver. Finally, we discuss ongoing work to extend the current solver for steady-state or frequency-domain RTE into the time-domain RTE and to develop a parallelized solver.