New gas radiation model of high accuracy based on the principle of weighted sum of gray gases

Abstract

The standard WSGG (Weighted Sum of Gray Gases) model is very fast and simple but can lead to relatively high discrepancies in the computation of the radiative heat transfer. A new model of high accuracy relying on the principle of the WSGG model is proposed. Contrary to the standard WSGG model, the pressure absorption coefficient depends here weakly on the temperature while the weighting factor is not predefined by a mathematical function. Mathematical properties on the model parameters are obtained and we show that all the model parameters can be determined from only one of them. This last is reconstructed with an efficient inverse algorithm from the total radiative heat source data computed with the LBL method using HITEMP 2010. We propose an efficient method to find good initial guesses (of the model parameters) leading to the best accuracy of the model. It is shown, on 17 selected 1D cases representative of the combustion of CO2H2O mixtures, that the maximum relative errors on the radiative heat source for the new model (based on 6 gray gases) does not exceed 3.5% (for these 17 cases) whereas for the standard WSGG model, these errors vary up to 14.5% (five cases have errors higher than 10.0% and nine cases have errors between 5.0% and 10.0%). The accuracy of the total radiative heat flux is also greatly enhanced with the new model. We also show that the present model is robust and can be used in 3D geometry.