A robust numerical method called the Preconditioned Bi-Conjugate Gradient
(Pre-BiCG)method is proposed for the solution of radiative transfer equation in
spherical geometry.A variant of this method called Stabilized Preconditioned
Bi-Conjugate Gradient (Pre-BiCG-STAB) is also presented. These are iterative
methods based on the construction of a set of bi-orthogonal vectors. The
application of Pre-BiCG method in some benchmark tests show that the method is
quite versatile, and can handle hard problems that may arise in astrophysical
radiative transfer theory.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figure