Incident energy transfer equation and its solution by collocation spectral method for one-dimensional radiative heat transfer

Abstract

The ray-effect is a major discretization error in the approximate solution method for the radiative transfer equation (RTE). To overcome this problem, the incident energy transfer equation (IETE) is proposed. The incident energy, instead of radiation intensity, is obtained by directly solving this new equation. Good numerical properties are found for the incident energy transfer equation. To show the properties of numerical solution, the collocation spectral method (CSM) is employed to solve the incident energy transfer equation. Three test cases are taken into account to verify the performance of the incident energy transfer equation. The result shows that the radiative heat flux obtained based on IETE is much more accurate than that based on RTE, which means that the IETE is very effective in eliminating the impacts of ray-effect on the heat flux. However, on the contrary, the radiative intensity obtained based on IETE is less accurate than that based on RTE due to the ray-effect. So, this equation is more suitable for those radiative heat transfer problems, in which the radiation heat flux and incident energy are needed rather than the radiation intensity.