Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

High Order Finite Volume Nonlinear Schemes for the Boltzmann Transport Equation

Conference ·

The authors apply the nonlinear WENO (Weighted Essentially Nonoscillatory) scheme to the spatial discretization of the Boltzmann Transport Equation modeling linear particle transport. The method is a finite volume scheme which ensures not only conservation, but also provides for a more natural handling of boundary conditions, material properties and source terms, as well as an easier parallel implementation and post processing. It is nonlinear in the sense that the stencil depends on the solution at each time step or iteration level. By biasing the gradient calculation towards the stencil with smaller derivatives, the scheme eliminates the Gibb's phenomenon with oscillations of size O(1) and reduces them to O(h{sup r}), where h is the mesh size and r is the order of accuracy. The current implementation is three-dimensional, generalized for unequally spaced meshes, fully parallelized, and up to fifth order accurate (WENO5) in space. For unsteady problems, the resulting nonlinear spatial discretization yields a set of ODE's in time, which in turn is solved via high order implicit time-stepping with error control. For the steady-state case, they need to solve the non-linear system, typically by Newton-Krylov iterations. There are several numerical examples presented to demonstrate the accuracy, non-oscillatory nature and efficiency of these high order methods, in comparison with other fixed-stencil schemes.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Lab., Livermore, CA (US)
Sponsoring Organization:
US Department of Energy (US)
DOE Contract Number:
W-7405-ENG-48
OSTI ID:
15015871
Report Number(s):
UCRL-PROC-210944
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (4)

Essentially non-oscillatory and weighted essentially non-oscillatory schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws book January 1998
Subcell balance methods for radiative transfer on arbitrary grids journal January 1997
High resolution schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws journal March 1983
Uniformly high order accurate essentially non-oscillatory schemes, III journal August 1987

Similar Records

Parallel-in-Time Solution of Scalar Nonlinear Conservation Laws
Journal Article · Sun Nov 02 23:00:00 EST 2025 · SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing · OSTI ID:3001311

An Eulerian–Lagrangian Weighted Essentially Nonoscillatory scheme for nonlinear conservation laws
Journal Article · Wed Sep 28 00:00:00 EDT 2016 · Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations · OSTI ID:1533200

Denovo--A New Three-Dimensional Parallel Discrete Ordinates Code in SCALE
Journal Article · Thu Dec 31 23:00:00 EST 2009 · Nuclear Technology · OSTI ID:984374