Jump to content

Chandrasekhar's H-function

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chandrasekhar's H-function for different albedo

In atmospheric radiation, Chandrasekhar's H-function appears as the solutions of problems involving scattering, introduced by the Indian American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.[1][2][3][4][5] The Chandrasekhar's H-function defined in the interval , satisfies the following nonlinear integral equation

where the characteristic function is an even polynomial in satisfying the following condition

.

If the equality is satisfied in the above condition, it is called conservative case, otherwise non-conservative. Albedo is given by . An alternate form which would be more useful in calculating the H function numerically by iteration was derived by Chandrasekhar as,

.

In conservative case, the above equation reduces to

.

Approximation

[edit]

The H function can be approximated up to an order as

where are the zeros of Legendre polynomials and are the positive, non vanishing roots of the associated characteristic equation

where are the quadrature weights given by

Explicit solution in the complex plane

[edit]

In complex variable the H equation is

then for , a unique solution is given by

where the imaginary part of the function can vanish if is real i.e., . Then we have

The above solution is unique and bounded in the interval for conservative cases. In non-conservative cases, if the equation admits the roots , then there is a further solution given by

Properties

[edit]
  • . For conservative case, this reduces to .
  • . For conservative case, this reduces to .
  • If the characteristic function is , where are two constants(have to satisfy ) and if is the nth moment of the H function, then we have

and

See also

[edit]
[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan. Radiative transfer. Courier Corporation, 2013.
  2. ^ Howell, John R., M. Pinar Menguc, and Robert Siegel. Thermal radiation heat transfer. CRC press, 2010.
  3. ^ Modest, Michael F. Radiative heat transfer. Academic press, 2013.
  4. ^ Hottel, Hoyt Clarke, and Adel F. Sarofim. Radiative transfer. McGraw-Hill, 1967.
  5. ^ Sparrow, Ephraim M., and Robert D. Cess. "Radiation heat transfer." Series in Thermal and Fluids Engineering, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978, Augmented ed. (1978).