Discrete ordinate method with a new and a simple quadrature scheme

Abstract

Evaluation of the radiative component in heat-transfer problems is often difficult and expensive. To address this problem, in the recent past, attention has been focused on improving the performance of various approximate methods. Computational efficiency of any method depends to a great extent on the quadrature schemes that are used to compute the source term and heat flux. The discrete ordinate method (DOM) is one of the oldest and still the most widely used methods. To make this method computationally more attractive, various types of quadrature schemes have been suggested over the years. In the present work, a new quadrature scheme has been suggested. The new scheme is a simple one and does not involve complicated mathematics for determination of direction cosines and weights. It satisfies all the required moments. To test the suitability of the new scheme, four benchmark problems were considered. In all cases, the proposed quadrature scheme was found to give accurate results.