On-the-Fly ROM-Based Acceleration of SI-DSA for Implicit Time Marching of the Radiative Transfer Equation

Abstract: In implicit time marching of the radiative transfer equation (RTE), the resulting linear systems are commonly solved using source iteration with diffusion synthetic acceleration (SI-DSA). Despite its widespread success, the performance of the DSA preconditioner may deteriorate when the RTE cannot be well approximated by its diffusion limit. Moreover, classical SI-DSA does not exploit low-rank structures of the solution manifold across time steps when the solution evolves smoothly. To address these limitations, we develop an on-the-fly reduced-order-model (ROM)-based acceleration for SI-DSA in implicit time marching of the RTE. Instead of relying on a diffusion approximation, the proposed approach constructs ROMs directly from the underlying kinetic formulation while exploiting low-rank structures in the temporal evolution of the solution. The method is fully offline-free and constructs ROMs to enhance both initial guesses and preconditioners on the fly during time marching. To handle streaming solution data, we design efficient and memory-lean ROM construction and adaptive update strategies based on dynamical mode decomposition, incremental low-rank singular value decomposition, and error indicators. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently accelerates implicit time marching, delivering $1.4\times$ to $2.0\times$ speedup over classical SI-DSA while incurring only marginal overhead for ROM construction and updates.