EFFICIENT CALCULATION OF RADIATION HEAT TRANSFER IN ANISOTROPICALLY SCATTERING MEDIA USING THE QL METHOD

Abstract

In the general-purpose computational fluid dynamics codes, radiation heat transfer is often computed using the P1 model, which can be inaccurate, or the Finite Volume or Discrete Ordinates method, which can be computationally very expensive. The present research objective was to develop a solution method, called the QL method, which permits both the accuracy and cost to be controlled. The method has been previously shown to work well for radiation-only problems involving emission/absorption and isotropic scattering in a gray medium. This paper demonstrates the method on problems involving anisotropic scattering. It is shown that any scattering phase function can be handled in the QL method, and that accurate results are obtained at reasonable cost.