Mixed-hybrid finite element method for the transport equation and diffusion approximation of transport problems

This thesis focuses on mathematical analysis, numerical resolution and modelling of the transport equations. First of all, we deal with numerical approximation of the solution of the transport equations by using a mixed-hybrid scheme. We derive and study a mixed formulation of the transport equation, then we analyse the related variational problem and present the discretization and the main properties of the scheme. We particularly pay attention to the behavior of the scheme and we show its efficiency in the diffusion limit (when the mean free path is small in comparison with the characteristic length of the physical domain). We present academical benchmarks in order to compare our scheme with other methods in many physical configurations and validate our method on analytical test cases. Unstructured and very distorted meshes are used to validate our scheme. The second part of this thesis deals with two transport problems. The first one is devoted to the study of diffusion due to boundary conditions in a transport problem between two plane plates. The second one consists in modelling and simulating radiative transfer phenomenon in case of the industrial context of inertial confinement fusion. (author)