Parametric Study of Simultaneous Radiative Transfer in Plane-Parallel Scattering Medium With Variable Refractive Index by Spectral Collocation Method

In this work, a spectral collocation method is developed to simulate radiative transfer in a refractive planar medium. The space and angular domains of radiative intensity are discretized by Chebyshev polynomials, and the angular derivative term and the integral term of radiative transfer equation are approximated by spectral collocation method. The spectral collocation method can provide exponential convergence and obtain high accuracy even using few nodes. There is a very satisfying correspondence between the spectral collocation results and available data in literatures. Influence of the extinction coefficient, the scattering albedo, the scattering phase function, the gradient of refractive index and the emissivity of boundary are investigated for the plane-parallel scattering medium with variable refractive index.