This paper is about the construction of a unified gas-kinetic scheme (UGKS) for a coupled system of radiative transport and material heat conduction with different diffusive limits. Different from the previous approach, instead of including absorption/emission only, the current method takes both scattering and absorption/emission mechanism into account in the radiative transport process. As a result, two asymptotic limiting solutions will appear in the diffusive regime. In the strong absorption/emission case, an equilibrium diffusion limit is obtained, where the system is mainly driven by a nonlinear diffusion equation for the equilibrium radiation and material temperature. However, in the strong scattering case, a non-equilibrium limit can be obtained, where coupled nonlinear diffusion system with different radiation and material temperature is obtained. In addition to including the scattering term in the transport equation, an implicit UGKS (IUGKS) will be developed in this paper as well. In the IUGKS, the numerical flux for the radiation intensity is constructed implicitly. Therefore, the conventional CFL constraint for the time step is released. With the use of a large time step for the radiative transport, it becomes possible to couple the IUGKS with the gas dynamic equations to develop an efficient numerical method for radiative hydrodynamics. The IUGKS is a valid method for all radiative transfer regimes. A few numerical examples will be presented to validate the current implicit method for both optical thin to optical thick cases.

The computation of the radiative transfer equation is expensive mainly due to two stiff terms: the transport term and the collision operator. The stiffness in the former comes from the fact that particles (such as photons) travel at the speed of light, while that in the latter is due to the strong scattering in the optically thick region. We study the fully implicit scheme for this equation to account for the stiffness. The main challenge in the implicit treatment is the coupling between the spacial and angular coordinates that requires the large size of the to-be-inverted matrix, which is also ill-conditioned and not necessarily symmetric. Our main idea is to utilize the spectral structure of the ill-conditioned matrix to construct a pre-conditioner, which, along with an exquisite split of the spatial and angular dependence, significantly improve the condition number and allows a matrix-free treatment. We also design a fast solver to compute this pre-conditioner explicitly in advance. Our method is shown to be efficient in both diffusive and free streaming limit, and the computational cost is comparable to the state-of-the-art method. Various examples including anisotropic scattering and two-dimensional problems are provided to validate the effectiveness of our method.

We present a three dimensional preconditioned implicit free-surface capture scheme on tetrahedral grids. The current scheme improves our recently reported method [10] in several aspects. Specifically, we modified the original eigensystem by applying a preconditioning matrix so that the new eigensystem is virtually independent of density ratio, which is typically large for practical two-phase problems. Further, we replaced the explicit multi-stage Runge-Kutta method by a fully implicit Euler integration scheme for the Navier-Stokes (NS) solver and the Volume of Fluids (VOF) equation is now solved with a second order Crank-Nicolson implicit scheme to reduce the numerical diffusion effect. The preconditioned restarted Generalized Minimal RESidual method (GMRES) is then employed to solve the resulting linear system. The validation studies show that with these modifications, the method has improved stability and accuracy when dealing with large density ratio two-phase problems.

Moudafi and Maingé [Towards viscosity approximations of hierarchical fixed-point problems, Fixed Point Theory Appl. (2006), Art. ID 95453, 10pp] and Xu [Viscosity method for hierarchical fixed point approach to variational inequalities, Taiwanese J. Math.13(6) (2009)] studied an implicit viscosity method for approximating solutions of variational inequalities by solving hierarchical fixed point problems. The approximate solutions are a net (xs,t) of two parameters s,t∈(0,1), and under certain conditions, the iterated lim t→0lim s→0xs,t exists in the norm topology. Moudafi, Maingé and Xu stated the problem of convergence of (xs,t) as (s,t)→(0,0) jointly in the norm topology. In this paper we further study the behaviour of the net (xs,t); in particular, we give a negative answer to this problem.