A multigroup diffusion solver using pseudo transient continuation for a radiation-hydrodynamic code with patch-based AMR

We present a scheme to solve the nonlinear multigroup radiation diffusion (MGD) equations. The method is incorporated into a massively parallel, multidimensional, Eulerian radiation-hydrodynamic code with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). The patch-based AMR algorithm refines in both space and time creating a hierarchy of levels, coarsest to finest. The physics modules are time-advanced using operator splitting. On each level, separate “level-solve” packages advance the modules. Our multigroup level-solve adapts an implicit procedure which leads to a twostep iterative scheme that alternates between elliptic solves for each group with intra-cell group coupling. For robustness, we introduce pseudo transient continuation (Ψtc). We analyze the magnitude of the Ψtc parameter to ensure positivity of the resulting linear system, diagonal dominance and convergence of the two-step scheme. For AMR, a level defines a subdomain for refinement. For diffusive processes such as MGD, the refined level uses Dirichet boundary data at the coarse-fine interface and the data is derived from the coarse level solution. After advancing on the fine level, an additional procedure, the sync-solve (SS), is required in order to enforce conservation. The MGD SS reduces to an elliptic solve on a combined grid for a system of G equations, where G is the number of groups. We adapt the “partial temperature” scheme for the SS; hence, we reuse the infrastructure developed for scalar equations. Results are presented. We consider a multigroup test problem with a known analytic solution. We demonstrate utility of Ψtc by running with increasingly larger timesteps. Lastly, we simulate the sudden release of energy Y inside an Al sphere ∗This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract No. W7405-Eng-48. 1 ar X iv :0 71 0. 45 09 v1 [ as tr oph ] 2 4 O ct 2 00 7