A Monte Carlo Synthetic-Acceleration Method for Solving the Thermal Radiation Diffusion Equation

Abstract

We present a novel synthetic-acceleration based Monte Carlo method for solving the equilibrium thermal radiation diusion equation in three dimensions. The algorithm performance is compared against traditional solution techniques using a Marshak benchmark problem and a more complex multiple material problem. Our results show that not only can our Monte Carlo method be an eective solver for sparse matrix systems, but also that it performs competitively with deterministic methods including preconditioned Conjugate Gradient while producing numerically identical results. We also discuss various aspects of preconditioning the method and its general applicability to broader classes of problems.