Spectral Method for 1-D Neutron Transport Equation

Abstract

In this paper, we present an efficient fully spectral approximation scheme for exploring the one-dimensional steady-state neutron transport equation. Our methodology integrates the spectral-(Petrov-)Galerkin scheme in the spatial dimension with the Legendre-Gauss collocation scheme in the directional dimension. The directional integral in the original problem is discretized with Legendre-Gauss quadrature. We furnish a rigorous proof of the solvability of this scheme and, to our best knowledge, conduct a comprehensive error analysis for the first time. Notably, the order of convergence is optimal in the directional dimension, while in the spatial dimension, it is suboptimal and, importantly, non-improvable. Finally, we verify the computational efficiency and error characteristics of the scheme through several numerical examples.