On the use of a nascent delta function in radiative-transfer calculations for multi-layer media subject to Fresnel boundary and interface conditions

• Published in: Journal of quantitative spectroscopy & radiative transfer Vol. 111; no. 1; pp. 128 - 133
• Main Authors: Garcia, R.D.M., Siewert, C.E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 2010
• Subjects: Discrete-ordinates method; Fresnel conditions; Nascent delta function; Radiative transfer; Radiative transfer; Nascent delta function; Fresnel conditions; Discrete-ordinates method
• ISSN: 0022-4073; 1879-1352
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jqsrt.2009.06.004

The “pre-processing” procedure and the “break-point” analysis developed in a previous work based on the ADO (analytical discrete ordinates) method are used, along with a nascent delta function to describe the polar-angle dependence of an incident beam, to solve the classical albedo problem for radiative transfer in a plane-parallel, multi-layer medium subject to Fresnel boundary and interface conditions. As a result of the use of a nascent delta function, rather than the Dirac distribution, to model the polar-angle dependence of the incident beam, the computational work is significantly simplified (since a particular solution is not required) in comparison to an approach where both the polar-angle and the azimuthal-angle dependence of the incident beam are formulated in terms of Dirac delta distributions. The numerical results from this approach are (when a sufficiently small “narrowness” parameter is used to define the nascent delta) found to be in complete agreement with already reported (high-quality) results for a set of challenging multi-layer problems.