A grey diffusion acceleration method for time-dependent radiative transfer calculations: analysis and application

A grey diffusion acceleration method is presented and is shown by Fourier analysis and test calculations to be effective in accelerating radiative transfer calculations. The spectral radius is bounded by 0.9 for the continuous equations, but is significantly smaller for the discretized equations, especially in the optically thick regimes characteristic to radiation transport problems. The GDA method is more efficient than the multigroup DSA method because its slightly higher iteration count is more than offset by the much lower cost per iteration. A wide range of test calculations confirm the efficiency of GDA compared to multifrequency DSA. (orig.)