Goal-based angular adaptivity for Boltzmann transport in the presence of ray-effects

Boltzmann transport problems often involve heavy streaming, where particles propagate long distance due to the dominance of advection over particle interaction. If an insufficiently refined non-rotationally invariant angular discretisation is used, there are areas of the problem where no particles will propagate. These “ray-effects” are problematic for goal-based error metrics with angular adaptivity, as the metrics in the pre-asymptotic region will be zero/incorrect and angular adaptivity will not occur. In this work we use low-order filtered spherical harmonics, which are rotationally invariant and hence not subject to ray-effects, to “bootstrap” our error metric and enable highly refined anisotropic angular adaptivity with a Haar wavelet angular discretisation. We test this on three simple problems with pure streaming in which traditional error metrics fail. We show our method is robust and produces adapted angular discretisations that match results produced by fixed a priori refinement with either reduced runtime or a constant additional cost even with angular refinement.