A hybrid Monte-Carlo method applied to the calculation of view factors in cylindrical shells

Abstract

A hybrid Monte-Carlo method (MC_H) is extended to calculate view factors for a system. The test case considered is a cylindrical shell. The MC_H has many advantages over the standard approach of using ray tracing (MC_RT); it is very efficient, view factor algebra can be used to reduce the number of view factors the MC_H is applied to, and the allocation of function evaluations for each view factor can be changed to account for the distance between surfaces and the surface areas. For the view factor system considered a typical speed-up of 48 compared to MC_RT is achieved, and for a hybrid quasi-Newton-method the speed-up is 480.