A simplified spherical harmonic method for coupled electron-photon transport calculations

In this thesis the author has developed a simplified spherical harmonic method (SP{sub N} method) and associated efficient solution techniques for 2-D multigroup electron-photon transport calculations. The SP{sub N} method has never before been applied to charged-particle transport. He has performed a first time Fourier analysis of the source iteration scheme and the P{sub 1} diffusion synthetic acceleration (DSA) scheme applied to the 2-D SP{sub N} equations. The theoretical analyses indicate that the source iteration and P{sub 1} DSA schemes are as effective for the 2-D SP{sub N} equations as for the 1-D S{sub N} equations. In addition, he has applied an angular multigrid acceleration scheme, and computationally demonstrated that it performs as well as for the 2-D SP{sub N} equations as for the 1-D S{sub N} equations. It has previously been shown for 1-D S{sub N} calculations that this scheme is much more effective than the DSA scheme when scattering is highly forward-peaked. The author has investigated the applicability of the SP{sub N} approximation to two different physical classes of problems: satellite electronics shielding from geomagnetically trapped electrons, and electron beam problems