A NON-LINEAR DISCONTINUOUS PETROV-GALERKIN METHOD FOR REMOVING OSCILLATIONS IN THE SOLUTION OF THE TIME-DEPENDENT TRANSPORT EQUATION

摘要

This paper describes a Non-Linear Discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin method and its application to the one-speed Boltzmann Transport Equation (BTE) for space-time problems. The purpose of the method is to remove unwanted oscillations in the transport solution which occur in the vicinity of sharp flux gradients, while improving computational efficiency and numerical accuracy. This is achieved by applying artificial dissipation in the solution gradient direction, internal to an element using a novel finite element (FE) Riemann approach. The added dissipation is calculated at each node of the finite element mesh based on local behaviour of the transport solution on both the spatial and temporal axes of the problem. Thus a different dissipation is used in different elements. The magnitude of dissipation that is used is obtained from a gradient-informed scaling of the advection velocities in the stabilisation term. This makes the method in its most general form non-linear. The method is implemented within a very general finite element Riemann framework. This makes it completely independent of choice of angular basis function allowing one to use different descriptions of the angular variation. Results show the non-linear scheme performs consistently well in demanding time-dependent multi-dimensional neutron transport problems.