A local character based method for solving linear systems of radiation diffusion problems

Abstract The radiation diffusion problem is a kind of time-dependent nonlinear equations. For solving the radiation diffusion equations, many linear systems are obtained in the nonlinear iterations at each time step. The cost of linear equations dominates the numerical simulation of radiation diffusion applications, such as inertial confinement fusion, etc. Usually, iterative methods are used to solve the linear systems in a real application. Moreover, the solution of the previous nonlinear iteration or the solution of the previous time step is typically used as the initial guess for solving the current linear equations. Because of the strong local character in ICF, with the advancing of nonlinear iteration and time step, the solution of the linear system changes dramatically in some local domain, and changes mildly or even has no change in the rest domain. In this paper, a local character-based method is proposed to solve the linear systems of radiation diffusion problems. The proposed method consists of three steps: firstly, a local domain (algebraic domain) is constructed; secondly, the subsystem on the local domain is solved; and lastly, the whole system will be solved. Two methods are given to construct the local domain. One is based on the spatial gradient, and the other is based on the residual. Numerical tests for a two-dimensional heat conduction model problem, and two real application models, the multi-group radiation diffusion equations and the three temperature energy equations, are conducted. The test results show that the solution time for solving the linear system can be reduced dramatically by using the local character-based method.