Discontinuous spectral element method for solving radiative heat transfer in multidimensional semitransparent media

A discontinuous spectral element method (DSEM) is presented to solve radiative heat transfer in multidimensional semitransparent media. This method is based on the general discontinuous Galerkin formulation. Chebyshev polynomial is used to build basis function on each element and both structured and unstructured elements are considered. The DSEM has properties such as lip-convergence, local conservation and its solutions are allowed to be discontinuous across interelement boundaries. The influences of different schemes for treatment of the interelement numerical flux on the performance of the DSEM are compared. The p-convergence characteristics of the DSEM are studied. Four various test problems are taken as examples to verify the performance of the DSEM, especially the performance to solve the problems with discontinuity in the angular distribution of radiative intensity. The predicted results by the DSEM agree well with the benchmark solutions. Numerical results show that the p-convergence rate of the DSEM follows exponential law, and the DSEM is stable, accurate and effective to solve multidimensional radiative transfer in semitransparent media. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.