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We present a family of discretizations for the Variable Eddington Factor (VEF) equations that have high-order accuracy on curved meshes and efficient preconditioned iterative solvers. The VEF discretizations are combined with a high-order Discontinuous Galerkin transport discretization to form an effective high-order, linear transport method. The VEF discretizations are derived by extending the unified analysis of Discontinuous Galerkin methods for elliptic problems to the VEF equations. This framework is used to define analogs of the interior penalty, second method of Bassi and Rebay, minimal dissipation local Discontinuous Galerkin, and continuous finite element methods. The analysis of subspace correction preconditioners, which use a continuous operator to iteratively precondition the discontinuous discretization, is extended to the case of the non-symmetric VEF system. Numerical results demonstrate that the VEF discretizations have arbitrary-order accuracy on curved meshes, preserve the thick diffusion limit, and are effective on a proxy problem from thermal radiative transfer in both outer transport iterations and inner preconditioned linear solver iterations. In addition, a parallel weak scaling study of the interior penalty VEF discretization demonstrates the scalability of the method out to 1152 processors.

We present a new approach for solving high-order thermal radiative transfer (TRT) using the Variable Eddington Factor (VEF) method (also known as quasidiffusion). Our approach leverages the VEF equations, which consist of the first and second moments of the $S_N$ transport equation, to more efficiently compute the TRT solution for each time step. The scheme consists of two loops - an outer loop to converge the Eddington tensor and an inner loop to converge the iteration between the temperature equation and the VEF system. By converging the outer iteration, one obtains the fully implicit TRT solution for the given time step with a relatively low number of transport sweeps. However, one could choose to perform exactly one outer iteration (and therefore exactly one sweep) per time step, resulting in a semi-implicit scheme that is both highly efficient and robust. Our results indicate that the error between the one-sweep and fully implicit variants of our scheme may be small enough for consideration in many problems of interest., Comment: Submitted to the American Nuclear Society Mathematics & Computation 2021 Conference (The International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, Raleigh, North Carolina, October 3-7, 2021)

We present a new flux-fixup approach for arbitrarily high-order discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of the SN transport equation. This approach is sweep-compatible: as the transport sweep is performed, a local quadratic programming (QP) problem is solved in each spatial cell to ensure that the solution satisfies certain physical constraints, including local particle balance. The constraints can be chosen in two ways, leading to two variants of the method: QP Zero (QPZ) and QP Maximum Principle (QPMP). The coefficients of the solution are constrained to be nonnegative in QPZ, and they are constrained by an approximate discrete maximum principle in QPMP. There are two primary takeaways in this paper. First, it is shown that the QPMP method, when used with the positive Bernstein basis, eliminates negativities, preserves high-order accuracy for smooth problems, and significantly dampens unphysical oscillations in the solution. The second takeaway is that the Variable Eddington Factor (VEF) method can be used to accelerate the convergence of source iteration with fixup for problems with optically thick regions. Regardless of whether a fixup is applied, source iteration converges slowly when optically thick regions are present and acceleration is needed. When VEF is combined with fixed-up transport sweeps, the result is a scheme that produces a nonnegative solution, converges independently of the mean free path, and, in the case of the QPMP fixup, adheres to an approximate discrete maximum principle., Comment: Revised draft submitted to Journal of Computational Physics