Predicting Radiating Shock Experiments
December 2, 2010
2:30 p.m.
Ryan McClarren
Abstract
His recent work has looked at ways of solving kinetic equations based on splitting the particles into ones that have collided during a time step and those that have collided and those that have not. This splitting is motivated by the fact that different schemes work better for uncollided versus collided particles. For example, in neutral particle kinetics the phase space density for uncollided particles can be computed via ray-tracing techniques, and the collided particles can be described by low-order methods such as diffusion. Through this new splitting technique we avoid applying ray-tracing techniques to track collided particles (which can be very expensive) or using diffusion methods to evolve particles that stream freely (which is inaccurate). Initial numerical results look promising and the theory of these methods is currently being investigated.
McClarren also represented IAMCS at the recent SIAM annual meeting where he co-organized a mini-symposium and presented his recent research. The mini-symposium brought together 17 speakers from across America and Europe.