Transport-Matched Penalties for Diffusion Synthetic Acceleration of Polytopic Discontinuous Galerkin Discretisations

Abstract

Diffusion synthetic acceleration is most effective when its diffusion correction reflects the transport discretisation that generates the iteration error. We develop this principle for high-order upwind discontinuous Galerkin discretisations of discrete-ordinates transport on polytopic meshes. From the discrete transport sweep, we derive the exact scalar correction that removes the source-iteration scalar error in one step. We prove that the associated scalar response is positive and self-adjoint, obtain an exact expression for the source-iteration convergence factor, and quantify the additional damping produced by vacuum leakage. Using the exact correction as a reference, we construct a transport-matched modified interior penalty correction whose boundary terms are inherited directly from homogeneous vacuum inflow. In the optically thick regime, the resulting MIP form approximates the exact correction with relative error proportional to the effective cell Knudsen number. This gives a strict acceleration of source iteration, with bounds uniform in mesh size, polynomial degree, and element face count for admissible polytopic meshes. Numerical experiments on Cartesian and centroidal Voronoi meshes confirm the predicted convergence and correction-operator scaling.