Blue Sky and Hot Piles: The Evolution of Radiative Transfer Theory from Atmospheres to Nuclear Reactors

✍ Scribed by Steven N. Shore

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 164 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0315-0860
• DOI: 10.1006/hmat.2002.2360

✦ Synopsis

Radiative transfer theory has mirrored many of the trends in the development of applied mathematics during the past century. It began with the development of the phenomenological equation of transfer at the start of the century, designed to treat the passage of light through foggy opaque atmospheres. By the mid-1940s, the theory provided detailed modeling of stellar and planetary atmospheres and subsequently transformed into the remote sensing problem of remote diagnoses of physical conditions and abundances in such environments. During the late 1940s, the need to treat neutron transfer in complex geometries led to an interest in applying these methods to nuclear reactors, using methods of invariant imbedding. Monte Carlo simulations, and integral equations, all areas of continuing study. The formative period, mainly analytic in thrust, ended by the mid-1960s with the comprehensive treatises by Chandrasekhar, Ambartsumian, Kourganoff, Busbridge, Sobolev, and Davison and the 11th AMS Applied Mathematics Symposium on nuclear reactors. Invariant imbedding and doubling methods have been widely developed for scattering problems, mainly in planetary atmospheres and nebular transfer, while improvements in computational methods over the past 30 years have introduced advances in multidimensional, multigroup transfer codes for neutron physics (Boltzmann equation solvers), neutrinos, and significant advances in radiative transfer and the growth of the field of radiation hydrodynamics. C 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) 1 I thank my friend and colleague at IUSB, Michael Kinyon, for many exciting discussions and clarifications of matters mathematical and for his meticulous scientific critique of the draft. My deep thanks also to Lys Ann Shore, who by her careful editorial judgment significantly improved this paper, and to Rolf Schimmrigk for providing a German translation of the abstract on very short notice. A portion of this work was written while I held visiting appointments at the Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri and I thank the staff for their hospitality and use of their superb library resources. I also thank Eugene Avrett, Tom Bolton, Peter Hauschildt, Rolf Kudritzki, and Thierry Lanz for valuable discussions and John Heilbron for comments on the draft. I reserve special thanks for Ivan Hubeny, who provided critical comments on this paper and many years of enlightening collaboration on astrophysical problems, and Dimitri Mihalas, Jason Aufdenberg, Paul Charbonneau, Glenn Wahlgren, and an anonymous referee and the editor, Craig Fraser, for encouragement and critical comments on the manuscript. Ivan also made me aware of the existence of published proceedings for the Armenian conference on invariant imbedding and generously provided a copy of several articles on very short notice.