Determination of the radiative boundary conditions on the surface of an enclosure

Abstract

A steady-state, inverse radiation problem is examined for a rectangular cavity exposed to uniform and parallel radiation from the outside. The surface is divided into small computational elements and the problem is formulated neglecting conduction in terms of the local element temperatures. The magnitude and incident direction of the radiation hitting the enclosure are determined from internal temperature sensor measurements by minimizing an appropriate objective function. The Davidson-Fletcher-Powell algorithm is selected for this task. The solution appears to be very sensitive to measurement errors in the temperature data, which create additional local minima in the objective function. The number of sensors used, as well as their locations over the surface also have a significant influence on the accuracy of the solution when the data is not exact.