Domain isolation concept for solution of radiative transfer in large-scale semitransparent media

Abstract

Due to the volume effect of radiative transfer, theoretically, radiative transfer equation needs to be solved in the entire close cavity containing semitransparent media. In many engineering applications, the solution of radiative transfer equation in the entire cavity for many large systems is complicated and time consuming, but sometimes the interesting zone is only some local small domain. In this paper, a domain isolation approximation of radiative heat transfer is present, in which the local domain is enlarged by an isolation optical thickness and isolated by blackbody boundaries with local temperature, and the radiative transfer equation only needs to be solved in the isolated domains. Two examples are taken to verify this new approximation. The results show that the accuracy of domain isolation approximation is very well when the isolation optical thickness is larger than 2.0.