On the Relation Between Spherical Harmonics and Simplified Spherical Harmonics Methods

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is, first, to recall the proof that the AN method and, therefore, the SP2N−1 method (of which AN was shown to be a variant) are equivalent to the odd order P2N−1, at least for a particular class of multi-region problems; namely the problems for which the total cross section has the same value for all the regions and the scattering is supposed to be isotropic. By virtue of the introduction of quadrature formulas representing first collision probabilities, this class is then enlarged in order to encompass the systems in which the regions may have different total cross sections. Some examples are reported to numerically validate the procedure.