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Results for “LEGENDRE POLYNOMIALS”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 19 records

The Legendre Polynomial Axial Expansion Method

This work presents a new formulation of the axial expansion transport method explicitly using Legendre polynomials for arbitrarily high-order expansions. This new formulation also features an alternative method of axial leakage calculation to allow for nonextruded flat source region meshes. This alternative axial leakage is introduced alongside a balance equation requirement to ensure that neutron balance is preserved in the coarse mesh for a given axial leakage formulation, which allows for effective coarse mesh finite difference acceleration. A matrix exponential table method is derived to allow for fast computations of arbitrarily high-order matrix exponentials for this work and precludes the need for further research into matrix exponential calculations for this method. Numerical results are presented that demonstrate the stability of the axial expansion method in systems with voidlike regions, showcase the speedup from matrix exponential tables, and investigate the axial convergence of the method in terms of both expansion order and mesh size.

Herring, Nicholas↗

Characterizing the Lyα forest flux probability distribution function using Legendre polynomials

The Lyman-α forest is a highly non-linear field with considerable information available in the data beyond the power spectrum. The flux probability distribution function (PDF) has been used as a successful probe of small-scale physics. In this paper we argue that measuring coefficients of the Legendre polynomial expansion of the PDF offers several advantages over measuring the binned values as is commonly done. In particular, the n -th Legendre coefficient can be expressed as a linear combination of the first n moments, allowing these coefficients to be measured in the presence of noise and allowing a clear route for marginalisation over mean flux. Moreover, in the presence of noise, our numerical work shows that a finite number of coefficients are well measured with a very sharp transition into noise dominance. This compresses the available information into a small number of well-measured quantities. In conclusion, we find that the amount of recoverable information is a very non-linear function of spectral noise that strongly favors fewer quasars measured at better signal to noise.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Construction and Investigation of the Third-Order Approximation to the Solution of the Heat-Conduction Equation for Thin Shallow Shells by Using Legendre Polynomials in the Case of Stationary Heat Exchange

By using the N th order approximation of temperature function and its first derivative by Legendre polynomials, we construct the solution of problem of heat conduction for a thin-walled shallow isotropic shell and deduce the system of resolving equations for the N th approximation. For the first and third approximations, we solve this problem for the case of concentrated heat sources. In the third approximation, we also construct the plots of the dependences of temperature on the distance to the heat source and on the curvature of the shell under the conditions of symmetric or asymmetric stationary heat exchange.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Use of Sobol’ Variance-Based Global Sensitivity Analysis and Multidimensional Legendre Polynomial Fitting for Reduced Order Modeling

Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) has developed a novel reduced order modeling approach. Prioritization of inputs is accomplished using Sobo' indices obtained through a more efficient variance-based global sensitivity analysis. To determine the Sobo' functions, simulated input values are aligned to collocation points to permit the use of Gauss-Lobatto integration, thereby reducing the number of simulation trials needed by more than an order of magnitude compared to standard Monte Carlo approaches. Furthermore, by leveraging the orthogonality of Legendre polynomials in conjunction with those same simulations at the collocation nodes, an efficient fitting method is developed to represent the Sobo' functions from which a reduced order model (ROM) is constructed. The developed method is both more efficient computationally, and the resulting ROM is more accurate. The efficacy of this technique is demonstrated on a nonlinear polynomial test function as well as the nonlinear Ishigami and Sobo' g functions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Measurement of EUV lithography pupil amplitude and phase variation via image-based methodology

Here, an approach to image-based EUV aberration metrology using binary mask targets and iterative model-based solutions to extract both the amplitude and phase components of the aberrated pupil function is presented. The approach is enabled through previously developed modeling, fitting, and extraction algorithms. We seek to examine the behavior of pupil amplitude variation in real-optical systems. Optimized target images were captured under several conditions to fit the resulting pupil responses. Both the amplitude and phase components of the pupil function were extracted from a zone-plate-based EUV mask microscope. The pupil amplitude variation was expanded in three different bases: Zernike polynomials, Legendre polynomials, and Hermite polynomials. It was found that the Zernike polynomials describe pupil amplitude variation most effectively of the three.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Deterministic absorbed dose estimation in computed tomography using a discrete ordinates method

Purpose: Organ dose estimation for a patient undergoing computed tomography (CT) scanning is very important. Although Monte Carlo methods are considered gold-standard in patient dose estimation, the computation time required is formidable for routine clinical calculations. Here, the authors instigate a deterministic method for estimating an absorbed dose more efficiently. Methods: Compared with current Monte Carlo methods, a more efficient approach to estimating the absorbed dose is to solve the linear Boltzmann equation numerically. In this study, an axial CT scan was modeled with a software package, Denovo, which solved the linear Boltzmann equation using the discrete ordinates method. The CT scanning configuration included 16 x-ray source positions, beam collimators, flat filters, and bowtie filters. The phantom was the standard 32 cm CT dose index (CTDI) phantom. Four different Denovo simulations were performed with different simulation parameters, including the number of quadrature sets and the order of Legendre polynomial expansions. A Monte Carlo simulation was also performed for benchmarking the Denovo simulations. A quantitative comparison was made of the simulation results obtained by the Denovo and the Monte Carlo methods. Results: The difference in the simulation results of the discrete ordinates method and those of the Monte Carlo methods was found to be small, with a root-mean-square difference of around 2.4%. It was found that the discrete ordinates method, with a higher order of Legendre polynomial expansions, underestimated the absorbed dose near the center of the phantom (i.e., low dose region). Simulations of the quadrature set 8 and the first order of the Legendre polynomial expansions proved to be the most efficient computation method in the authors’ study. The single-thread computation time of the deterministic simulation of the quadrature set 8 and the first order of the Legendre polynomial expansions was 21 min on a personal computer. Conclusions: The simulation results showed that the deterministic method can be effectively used to estimate the absorbed dose in a CTDI phantom. The accuracy of the discrete ordinates method was close to that of a Monte Carlo simulation, and the primary benefit of the discrete ordinates method lies in its rapid computation speed. It is expected that further optimization of this method in routine clinical CT dose estimation will improve its accuracy and speed.

07 ISOTOPE AND RADIATION SOURCES↗

An optimal FFT-based anisotropic power spectrum estimator

Measurements of line-of-sight dependent clustering via the galaxy power spectrum's multipole moments constitute a powerful tool for testing theoretical models in large-scale structure. Recent work shows that this measurement, including a moving line-of-sight, can be accelerated using Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) by decomposing the Legendre polynomials into products of Cartesian vectors. Here, we present a faster, optimal means of using FFTs for this measurement. We avoid redundancy present in the Cartesian decomposition by using a spherical harmonic decomposition of the Legendre polynomials. With this method, a given multipole of order ℓ requires only 2ℓ+1 FFTs rather than the (ℓ+1)(ℓ+2)/2 FFTs of the Cartesian approach. For the hexadecapole (ℓ = 4), this translates to 40% fewer FFTs, with increased savings for higher ℓ. The reduction in wall-clock time enables the calculation of finely-binned wedges in P ( k ,μ), obtained by computing multipoles up to a large ℓ{sub max} and combining them. This transformation has a number of advantages. We demonstrate that by using non-uniform bins in μ, we can isolate plane-of-sky (angular) systematics to a narrow bin at 0μ ≅ while eliminating the contamination from all other bins. We also show that the covariance matrix of clustering wedges binned uniformly in μ becomes ill-conditioned when combining multipoles up to large values of ℓ{sub max}, but that the problem can be avoided with non-uniform binning. As an example, we present results using ℓ{sub max}=16, for which our procedure requires a factor of 3.4 fewer FFTs than the Cartesian method, while removing the first μ bin leads only to a 7% increase in statistical error on f σ{sub 8}, as compared to a 54% increase with ℓ{sub max}=4.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Direct S{sub N} Treatment of the Scattering Source with Phase Functions

In deterministic transport, the angular dependency of the scattering source is described using a so-called phase function. The scattering operator is commonly expressed using a spherical harmonics (P{sub N}) expansion of this phase function. Not only does this require minimal modifications if the problem dimensionality is changed, but it also contains little to no approximation whenever the scattering anisotropy degree is small. An alternative method relying on a discrete ordinates (S{sub N}) approach - essentially computing the angular integral of the phase function with a finite number of weighted directions - is theoretically possible and has shown some advantages. In particular, this method was introduced for neutron elastic scattering and was shown to be more accurate for highly anisotropic group-to-group transfer cross-sections. Benefits were further shown in the case of a collimated beam in highly forward peaked scattering media, particularly reducing the memory usage by storing an angle-to-angle collision matrix rather than a large number of angular moments. In addition, the scattering source was expressed using that same method, the phase function having been previously expanded using Legendre polynomials, in the context of achieving extreme precision while solving the 1D radiative transfer equation. Based on these previous works, we aim at exploring two questions. First, we wish to derive an expression of the phase function in reduced geometries that does not require any more angular quadrature points than for a standard S N calculation. This is particularly relevant because the reduced phase function does not solely depend on the product of the incoming and outgoing directions. Second, we wish to better understand the relationship between the S{sub N} and P{sub N} treatments. We in particular show equivalence if the phase function in the former case is expanded Legendre polynomials. This equivalence is verified numerically and the computational costs of the methods are compared on a test problem involving a Dirac delta phase function.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Accessible solitons of fractional dimension

We demonstrate that accessible solitons described by an extended Schrödinger equation with the Laplacian of fractional dimension can exist in strongly nonlocal nonlinear media. The soliton solutions of the model are constructed by two special functions, the associated Legendre polynomials and the Laguerre polynomials in the fraction-dimensional space. Our results show that these fractional accessible solitons form a soliton family which includes crescent solitons, and asymmetric single-layer and multi-layer necklace solitons. -- Highlights: •Analytic solutions of a fractional Schrödinger equation are obtained. •The solutions are produced by means of self-similar method applied to the fractional Schrödinger equation with parabolic potential. •The fractional accessible solitons form crescent, asymmetric single-layer and multilayer necklace profiles. •The model applies to the propagation of optical pulses in strongly nonlocal nonlinear media.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Nearside-farside, local angular momentum and resummation theories: Useful tools for understanding the dynamics of complex-mode reactions

A valuable tool for understanding the dynamics of direct reactions is Nearside-Farside (NF) scattering theory. It makes a decomposition of the (resummed) partial wave series for the scattering amplitude, both for the differential cross section (DCS) and the Local Angular Momentum (LAM). This paper makes the first combined application of these techniques to complex-mode reactions. We ask if NF theory is a useful tool for their identification, in particular, can it distinguish complex-mode from direct-mode reactions? We also ask whether NF theory can identify NF interference oscillations in the full DCSs of complex-mode reactions. Our investigation exploits the fact that accurate quantum scattering matrix elements have recently become available for complex-mode reactions. We first apply NF theory to two simple models for the scattering amplitude of a complex-mode reaction: One involves a single Legendre polynomial; the other involves a single Legendre function of the first kind, whose form is suggested by complex angular momentum theory. We then study, at fixed translational energies, four state-to-state complex-mode reactions. They are: S({sup 1}D) + HD → SH + D, S({sup 1}D) + DH → SD + H, N({sup 2}D) +H{sub 2} → NH + H, and H{sup +} + D{sub 2} → HD + D{sup +}. We compare the NF results for the DCSs and LAMs with those for a state-to-state direct reaction, namely, F + H{sub 2} → FH + H. We demonstrate that NF theory is a valuable tool for identifying and analyzing the dynamics of complex-mode reactions.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Direct SN Treatment of the Scattering Source with Phase Functions

In deterministic transport, the scattering operator is commonly expressed using a spherical harmonics (pn) expansion of the scattering source. Not only does this require minimal modifications if the problem dimensionality is changed, but it also contains little to no approximation whenever the scattering anisotropy degree is small. An alternative method relying on a discrete ordinates (sn) approach -- essentially computing the angular integral of the phase function with a finite number of weighted directions -- is theoretically possible and has shown some advantages. In particular, this method was introduced for neutron elastic scattering and was shown to be more accurate for highly anisotropic group-to-group transfer cross-sections. Benefits were further shown in the case of a collimated beam in highly forward peaked scattering media, particularly reducing the memory usage by storing an angle-to-angle collision matrix rather than a large number of angular moments. In addition, the scattering source was expressed using that same method, the phase function having been previously expanded using Legendre polynomials, in the context of achieving extreme precision while solving the 1D radiative transfer equation. Based on these previous works, we aim at exploring two questions. First, we wish to derive an expression of the phase function in reduced geometries that does not require any more angular quadrature points than for a standard sn calculation. This is particularly relevant in 2-D problems where the reduced phase function does not solely depend on the product of the incoming and outgoing directions. Second, we wish to better understand the relationship between the sn and pn treatments. We in particular show equivalence if the phase function in the former case is expanded Legendre polynomials. This equivalence is verified numerically and the computational costs of the methods are compared on a test problem involving a Dirac delta phase function.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A CFD Study Assisted with Experimental Confirmation for Liquid Shape Control of Electromagnetically Levitated Bulk Materials

Two types of optimized electromagnetic levitators were designed to achieve the free surface shape control of metallic melts as the combined results of the Lorentz force, sample gravity, and surface tension. The levitation behavior of bulk melts was investigated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling coupled with high-frequency electromagnetic field analysis and the arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) method. The difference in the oscillation behavior between the solid and molten samples was explained by the damping of the electromagnetic induction and liquid viscosity. The motion of the mass center, melt shape, flow pattern, and Lorentz force in the levitated melt were determined within a wide excitation current range. With the increase in the applied current, the melt’s centroid position rose sharply in the area with low current but displayed a slow increase in the area with high current. Meanwhile, the stable shape of the bulk melt showed the typical transition from a long taper through a short taper and then into a rhombus. The internal flow pattern transformed from a simple double-loop structure to a complex configuration with three or four loops. The dependence of the deformation on the Bond number was analyzed in the two types of levitators. In addition, the stable shape and swing process of the bulk Al melt within the two types of electromagnetic levitation (EML) systems were quantitatively studied under protective inert gas conditions. The melt contour could be well described by the 10th Legendre polynomial function with a deviation of less than 0.5 pct.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

A Semi-Lagrangian Spectral Method for the Vlasov–Poisson System Based on Fourier, Legendre and Hermite Polynomials

In this study, we apply a semi-Lagrangian spectral method for the Vlasov–Poisson system, previously designed for periodic Fourier discretizations, by implementing Legendre polynomials and Hermite functions in the approximation of the distribution function with respect to the velocity variable. We discuss second-order accurate-in-time schemes, obtained by coupling spectral techniques in the space–velocity domain with a BDF time-stepping scheme. The resulting method possesses good conservation properties, which have been assessed by a series of numerical tests conducted on some standard benchmark problems including the two-stream instability and the Landau damping test cases. In the Hermite case, we also investigate the numerical behavior in dependence of a scaling parameter in the Gaussian weight. Confirming previous results from the literature, our experiments for different representative values of this parameter, indicate that a proper choice may significantly impact on accuracy, thus suggesting that suitable strategies should be developed to automatically update the parameter during the time-advancing procedure.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Angular dependence of primordial trispectra and CMB spectral distortions

Under the presence of anisotropic sources in the inflationary era, the trispectrum of the primordial curvature perturbation has a very specific angular dependence between each wavevector that is distinguishable from the one encountered when only scalar fields are present, characterized by an angular dependence described by Legendre polynomials. We examine the imprints left by curvature trispectra on the TT μ bispectrum, generated by the correlation between temperature anisotropies (T) and chemical potential spectral distortions (μ) of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Due to the angular dependence of the primordial signal, the corresponding TT μ bispectrum strongly differs in shape from TT μ sourced by the usual g {sub NL} or τ{sub NL} local trispectra, enabling us to obtain an unbiased estimation. From a Fisher matrix analysis, we find that, in a cosmic-variance-limited (CVL) survey of TT μ, a minimum detectable value of the quadrupolar Legendre coefficient is d {sub 2} ∼ 0.01, which is 4 orders of magnitude better than the best value attainable from the TTTT CMB trispectrum. In the case of an anisotropic inflationary model with a f (φ) F {sup 2} interaction (coupling the inflaton field φ with a vector kinetic term F {sup 2}), the size of the curvature trispectrum is related to that of quadrupolar power spectrum asymmetry, g {sub *}. In this case, a CVL measurement of TT μ makes it possible to measure g {sub *} down to 10{sup −3}.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Superconvergence results of Legendre spectral projection methods for Volterra integral equations of second kind

In this paper, Legendre spectral projection methods are applied for the Volterra integral equations of second kind with a smooth kernel. We prove that the approximate solutions of the Legendre Galerkin and Legendre collocation methods converge to the exact solution with the order O(n{sup −r}) in L{sup 2}-norm and order O(n{sup −r+(1/2)}) in infinity norm, and the iterated Legendre Galerkin solution converges with the order O(n{sup −2r}) in both L{sup 2}-norm and infinity norm, whereas the iterated Legendre collocation solution converges with the order O(n{sup −r}) in both L{sup 2}-norm and infinity norm, n being the highest degree of Legendre polynomials employed in the approximation and r being the smoothness of the kernels. We have also considered multi-Galerkin method and its iterated version, and prove that the iterated multi-Galerkin solution converges with the order O(n{sup −3r}) in both infinity and L{sup 2} norm. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the theoretical results.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Müntz wavelets collocation method for solving fractional differential equations

In this paper, we introduce a new set of wavelets, namely Müntz wavelets. These wavelets are defined based on Müntz Legendre polynomials which have the property of orthogonality. We stabilize the wavelet coefficients by utilizing Jacobi polynomials to construct the modified Müntz wavelets. Next, we present a collocation scheme based on Müntz wavelets for solving fractional differential equations. The fractional derivative is described in the Caputo sense. Some error estimates are given and numerical examples are included to demonstrate the applicability and accuracy of the proposed method. This includes the elastic-dissipative mathematical model of linear mechanical devices known as Boltzman operator.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Will kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich measurements enhance the science return from galaxy redshift surveys?

Yes. Future CMB experiments such as Advanced ACTPol and CMB-S4 should achieve measurements with S/N of > 0.1 for the typical host halo of galaxies in redshift surveys. These measurements will provide complementary measurements of the growth rate of large scale structure f and the expansion rate of the Universe H to galaxy clustering measurements. This paper emphasizes that there is significant information in the anisotropy of the relative pairwise kSZ measurements. We expand the relative pairwise kSZ power spectrum in Legendre polynomials and consider up to its octopole. Assuming that the noise in the filtered maps is uncorrelated between the positions of galaxies in the survey, we derive a simple analytic form for the power spectrum covariance of the relative pairwise kSZ temperature in redshift space. While many previous studies have assumed optimistically that the optical depth of the galaxies τ{sub T} in the survey is known, we marginalize over τ{sub T}, to compute constraints on the growth rate f and the expansion rate H . For realistic survey parameters, we find that combining kSZ and galaxy redshift survey data reduces the marginalized 1-σ errors on H and f to ∼50-70% compared to the galaxy-only analysis.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗