Unconditionally stable diffusion-acceleration of the transport equation

The standard iterative procedure for solving fixed-source discrete-ordinates problems converges very slowly for problems in optically thick regions with scattering ratios c near unity. The diffusion-synthetic acceleration method has been proposed to make use of the fact that for this class of problems, the diffusion equation is often an accurate approximation to the transport equation. However, stability difficulties have historically hampered the implementation of this method for general transport differencing schemes. In this article we discuss a recently developed procedure for obtaining unconditionally stable diffusion-synthetic acceleration methods for various transport differencing schemes. We motivate the analysis by first discussing the exact transport equation; then we illustrate the procedure by deriving a new stable acceleration method for the linear discontinuous transport differencing scheme. We also provide some numerical results