A consistent multigroup model for radiative transfer and its underlying mean opacities

Abstract In some regimes, such as in plasma physics or in superorbital atmospheric entry of space objects, the effects of radiation are crucial and can tremendously modify the hydrodynamics of the gas. In such cases, it is therefore important to have a good prediction of the radiative variables. However, full transport solutions of these multi-dimensional, time-dependent problems are too expensive to get to be involved in a coupled configuration. It is hence necessary to develop other models for radiation that are cheap, yet accurate enough to give good predictions of the radiative effects. We will herein introduce the multigroup- M 1 model and look at its characteristics and in particular try to separate the angular error from the frequential one since these two approximation play very different roles. The angular behaviour of the model will be tested on a case proposed by Su and Olson and used by Olson et al. to compare various moments and (flux-limited) diffusion models. For the frequency behaviour, we use a simplified flame test-case and show the importance of taking good mean opacities.