Discrete curved ray-tracing method for radiative transfer in an absorbing–emitting semitransparent slab with variable spatial refractive index

Abstract

A discrete curved ray-tracing method is developed to analyze the radiative transfer in one-dimensional absorbing–emitting semitransparent slab with variable spatial refractive index. The curved ray trajectory is locally treated as straight line and the complicated and time-consuming computation of ray trajectory is cut down. A problem of radiative equilibrium with linear variable spatial refractive index is taken as an example to examine the accuracy of the proposed method. The temperature distributions are determined by the proposed method and compared with the data in references, which are obtained by other different methods. The results show that the discrete curved ray-tracing method has a good accuracy in solving the radiative transfer in one-dimensional semitransparent slab with variable spatial refractive index.