Adaptive change of basis in entropy-based moment closures for linear kinetic equations

Abstract

Entropy-based (M_N) moment closures for kinetic equations are defined by a constrained optimization problem that must be solved at every point in a space-time mesh, making it important to solve these optimization problems accurately and efficiently. We present a complete and practical numerical algorithm for solving the dual problem in one-dimensional, slab geometries. The closure is only well-defined on the set of moments that are realizable from a positive underlying distribution, and as the boundary of the realizable set is approached, the dual problem becomes increasingly difficult to solve due to ill-conditioning of the Hessian matrix. To improve the condition number of the Hessian, we advocate the use of a change of polynomial basis, defined using a Cholesky factorization of the Hessian, that permits solution of problems nearer to the boundary of the realizable set. We also advocate a fixed quadrature scheme, rather than adaptive quadrature, since the latter introduces unnecessary expense and changes the computationally realizable set as the quadrature changes. For very ill-conditioned problems, we use regularization to make the optimization algorithm robust. We design a manufactured solution and demonstrate that the adaptive-basis optimization algorithm reduces the need for regularization. This is important since we also show that regularization slows, and even stalls, convergence of the numerical simulation when refining the space-time mesh. We also simulate two well-known benchmark problems. There we find that our adaptive-basis, fixed-quadrature algorithm uses less regularization than alternatives, although differences in the resulting numerical simulations are more sensitive to the regularization strategy than to the choice of basis.