Engineering topics

Warsa, J. S.

Publications and source records attributed to Warsa, J. S..

3 records

DOE OSTI2013

Thick diffusion limit boundary layer test problems

We develop two simple test problems that quantify the behavior of computational transport solutions in the presence of boundary layers that are not resolved by the spatial grid. In particular we study the quantitative effects of 'contamination' terms that, according to previous asymptotic analyses, may have a detrimental effect on the solutions obtained by both discontinuous finite element (DFEM) and characteristic-method (CM) spatial discretizations, at least for boundary layers caused by azimuthally asymmetric incident intensities. Few numerical results have illustrated the effects of this contamination, and none have quantified it to our knowledge. Our test problems use leading-order analytic solutions that should be equal to zero in the problem interior, which means the observed interior solution is the error introduced by the contamination terms. Results from DFEM solutions demonstrate that the contamination terms can cause error propagation into the problem interior for both orthogonal and non-orthogonal grids, and that this error is much worse for non-orthogonal grids. This behavior is consistent with the predictions of previous analyses. We conclude that these boundary layer test problems and their variants are useful tools for the study of errors that are introduced by unresolved boundary layers in diffusive transport problems. (authors)

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2013

A new, coupled transport-diffusion method for radiative transfer calculations

We derive and present a new frequency- and angle-integrated low-order system of equations designed to enhance the accuracy of a coupled, high-order (transport) solution of the thermal radiative transfer equations. In particular, our new low-order system is designed to use intensity-weighted opacities and anisotropic diffusion coefficients generated by a solution of the Implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) equations in order to predict the spatial dependence of the material temperature and radiation energies in the ensuing time cycle. The predicted temperature solution can then be exploited to generate appropriately time-centered opacities, specific heats, and Planck emission spectra for the upcoming IMC solution. Additionally, the relatively inexpensive solution of the low-order system can be iteratively solved to recommend an adaptive time step size before the IMC solution is computed. A test implementation has been implemented using existing software available from the Jayenne and Capsaicin projects at Los Alamos National Laboratory. We present initial results from a new driver code that has integrated these stochastic and deterministic software packages. (authors)

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2013

Comparison of two Galerkin quadrature methods

We compare two methods for generating Galerkin quadrature for problems with highly forward-peaked scattering. In Method 1, the standard Sn method is used to generate the moment-to-discrete matrix and the discrete-to-moment is generated by inverting the moment-to-discrete matrix. In Method 2, which we introduce here, the standard Sn method is used to generate the discrete-to-moment matrix and the moment-to-discrete matrix is generated by inverting the discrete-to-moment matrix. Method 1 has the advantage that it preserves both N eigenvalues and N eigenvectors (in a pointwise sense) of the scattering operator with an N-point quadrature. Method 2 has the advantage that it generates consistent angular moment equations from the corresponding S{sub N} equations while preserving N eigenvalues of the scattering operator with an N-point quadrature. Our computational results indicate that these two methods are quite comparable for the test problem considered. (authors)

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗