Hierarchical Adaptive Solution of Radiation Transport Problems on Unstructured Grids

Computational radiation transport has steadily gained acceptance in the last decade as a viable modeling tool due to the rapid advancements in computer software and hardware technologies. It can be applied for the analysis of a wide range of problems which arise in nuclear reactor physics, medical physics, atmospheric physics, astrophysics and other areas of engineering physics. However, radiation transport is an extremely chanllenging computational problem since the governing equation is seven-deimensional (3 in space, 2 in direction, 1 in energy, and 1 in time) with a high degree of coupleing betwen these variables. If not careful, this relatively large number of independent variables when discretized can potentially lead to sets of linear equations of intractable size. Though parallel computing has allowed the solution of very large problems, avaliable computational resources will always be finite due to the fact that every more sophisticated multiphysics models are being demanded by industry. There is thus the pressing requirement to optimize the discretizations so as to minimize the effort and maximize the accuracy