Improved Monte Carlo method for radiative heat transfer in semitransparent media with BRDF surface

Abstract

This paper proposes an improved Monte Carlo method (IMCM) for the radiative heat transfer solution in semitransparent media with BRDF surface for the first time. This method not only keeps the strong points of high precision and excellent applicability to the calculation of radiative heat transfer in complex shape scattering media with BRDF surface, but also overcomes the shortcomings of time-consuming for huge amounts of energy beams tracing in the Monte Carlo method. In the IMCM we developed, the energy beams of reflection or scattering can be worked out by proportional iteration accumulation. The scattering and reflection process only need to be sampled twice rather than lots of scattering and reflection energy beams tracing. This improvement not only retains the high accuracy of the MCM, but also greatly improves the calculation efficiency. A number of radiative heat transfer problems in semitransparent media enclosure with BRDF surface are studied. The effects of absorption coefficient, wall emissivity and scattering characteristics on radiative heat transfer are analyzed. Results indicate that the IMCM is a very efficient method with high precision for solving radiative heat transfer.