Open AccessLight scattering computation model for nonspherical aerosol particles based on multi-resolution time-domain scheme: model development and validation
Author(s) -
Shuai Hu,
Taichang Gao,
Hao Li,
Bo Yang,
Feng Zhang,
Ming Chen,
Lei Liu
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.25.001463
Subject(s) - scattering , mie scattering , radiative transfer , physics , computational physics , finite difference time domain method , optics , scattering theory , computation , extinction (optical mineralogy) , light scattering , t matrix method , mathematics , algorithm
Due to the inadequate understanding of the scattering properties of nonspherical aerosols, considerable uncertainties still exist in the radiative transfer numerical simulation. To this end, a new scattering model for nonspherical aerosols is established based on Multi-Resolution Time-Domain (MRTD) scheme. The model is comprised of three modules: near field calculation module, near-to-far transformation module and scattering parameters computation module, in which, the near electromagnetic field is calculated by MRTD technique, the near-to-far transformation scheme is performed by volume integral method, and the calculation models for extinction and absorption cross section are directly derived from Maxwell's curl equations in the frequency domain. To achieve higher computational efficiency, the model is further parallelized by MPI non-blocking repeated communication technique. The accuracy of the scattering model is validated against Lorenz-Mie, Aden-Kerker and T-matrix theories for spherical particles, particles with inclusions and nonspherical particles. At last, the parallel computational efficiency of the MRTD scattering model is quantitatively discussed as well. The results obtained by parallel MRTD scattering model show an excellent agreement with those of the well-tested scattering theories, where the relative simulation errors of the phase function are less than 5% for most scattering angles. In backward directions, the simulation errors are much larger than that in forward scattering directions due to the stair approximation in particle construction. The computational accuracy of the integral scattering parameters like extinction and absorption efficiencies is higher than phase matrix, where the simulation errors of extinction and absorption efficiencies for the particle with a size parameter of 10 achieve -0.4891% and -1.6933%, respectively.