Asymptotic analysis of the spatial discretization of radiation absorption and re-emission in implicit Monte Carlo (Q630340)

An asymptotic analysis of the spatial discretization of radiation absorption and re-emission in Implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) technique, a Monte Carlo for simulating nonlinear radiative transfer, is carried out. Due to the nonlinear nature of these types of problems, and in contrast to the standard Monte Carlo method, the IMC simulation uses both spatial and temporal discretizations and linearizations. Specifically, the approximation of absorption and re-emission by a spatially continuous artificial-scattering process and either a piecewise-constant or piecewise-linear emission source within each spatial cell is investigated. For the sake of simplicity, the analysis is performed on a steady-state, linear radiation transport problem with scattering which serves as a surrogate for absorption and re-emission. To model the spatial discretization of absorption and re-emission in the IMC simulation, scattering is split into spatially continuous and piecewise-constant or piecewise-linear components. In this article, three asymptotic scalings representing (i) a time step that resolves the mean-free time, (ii) a Courant limit on the time-step size, and (iii) a fixed time step that does not depend on any asymptotic scaling are considered. For the piecewise-constant approximation, it has been shown that only the third scaling results in a valid discretization of the proper diffusion equation, while for a certain class of problems the piecewise-linear approximation yields an appropriate discretized diffusion equation under all three scalings for nonzero boundary conditions. It is therefore expected that the IMC technique may generate inaccurate solutions with optically large spatial cells and the piecewise-constant discretization if time steps are refined; however, employing the piecewise-linear discretization will produce accurate solutions for a wider range of time-step sizes. A set of numerical examples has been presented that confirm the validity of the conducted asymptotic analysis.