On robustly convergent and efficient iterative methods for anisotropic radiative transfer

Abstract: This paper considers the iterative solution of linear systems arising from discretization of the anisotropic radiative transfer equation with discontinuous elements on the sphere. In order to achieve robust convergence behavior in the discretization parameters and the physical parameters we develop preconditioned Richardson iterations in Hilbert spaces. We prove convergence of the resulting scheme. The preconditioner is constructed in two steps. The first step borrows ideas from matrix splittings and ensures mesh independence. The second step uses a subspace correction technique to reduce the influence of the optical parameters. The correction spaces are build from low-order spherical harmonics approximations generalizing well-known diffusion approximations. We discuss in detail the efficient implementation and application of the discrete operators. In particular, for the considered discontinuous spherical elements, the scattering operator becomes dense and we show that $\mathcal{H}$- or $\mathcal{H}^2$-matrix compression can be applied in a black-box fashion to obtain almost linear or linear complexity when applying the corresponding approximations. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown in numerical examples.