3D RADIATIVE TRANSFER WITH FINITE DIFFERENCES AND FINITE

ELEMENTS
Rainer Wehrse
ZAH, Institut Fr Theoretische Astrophysics
Heidelberg University
D6900 Heidelberg
For arbitrarily shaped 3D objects the radiation fields can be modeled in most
cases easily by means of finite differences. Simple up-stream discretisation on
tensor-product grid lead to systems of linear equations that can be solved fast by
recursion. The source function is determined by a fixed-point iteration. Time
dependencies and frequency couplings (e.g. Doppler shifts or redistribution in
line problems) can be incorporated in a straightforward way. Additional
equations as e.g. rate equations may be solved together with the transfer
equation in an efficient way even when the system gets stiff. The disadvantages
of this approach are the often moderate accuracy and the lack of proper error
estimates. These problems can be overcome by the use of finite elements. For
them, a-posteriori errors can be determined that subsequently can be used to
refine the grid locally. This implies that an error bound may be specified in
advance and one can be sure that the final numerical result does not deviate from
the (unknown) analytical solution by more than this error. Experience has shown
that with the use of a suitable pre-conditioner the solution is obtained in a
very efficient way both with respect to CPU time and memory requirements.
The main difficulty of this method is the complex analytical and numerical
mathematics involved (e.g. functional analysis, iterative solution of sparse but
huge linear systems without symmetry). Several examples are shown to
illustrate the application of these methods.