A FAST APPROXIMATED METHOD OF RADIATIVE EXCHANGE FOR COMBINED HEAT TRANSFER SIMULATION

Abstract

The radiation element method (REM) was improved by using view factor approximation instead of the ray-tracing method to estimate the view factors. This improved method was applied to analyze radiative exchange between arbitrary three-dimensional bodies comprised of diffuse surfaces. The view factor approximation required one-sixth of the CPU time of the ray-tracing method to estimate the view factors for a model comprising of 7,344 surface elements. The total CPU time by the incomplete Cholesky conjugate gradient (ICCG) method plus the view factor approximation was reduced to one-fifth of that of the ICCG plus ray-tracing method.