COMPUTATIONAL EFFICIENCY OF A MODIFIED SCATTERING KERNEL FOR FULL-COUPLED PHOTON-ELECTRON TRANSPORT PARALLEL COMPUTING WITH UNSTRUCTURED TETRAHEDRAL MESHES

Abstract

Scattering source calculations using conventional spherical harmonic expansion may require lots of computation time to treat full-coupled three-dimensional photon-electron transport in a highly anisotropic scattering medium where their scattering cross sections should be expanded with very high order (e.g., P-7 or higher) Legendre expansions. In this paper, we introduce a modified scattering kernel approach to avoid the unnecessarily repeated calculations involved with the scattering source calculation, and used it with parallel computing to effectively reduce the computation time. Its computational efficiency was tested for three-dimensional full-coupled photon-electron transport problems using our computer program which solves the multi-group discrete ordinates transport equation by using the discontinuous finite element method with unstructured tetrahedral meshes for complicated geometrical problems. The numerical tests show that we can improve speed up to 17 similar to 42 times for the elapsed time per iteration using the modified scattering kernel, not only in the single CPU calculation but also in the parallel computing with several CPUs.