Numerical Simulation of Radiative Heat Transfer

Abstract

Radiative heat transfer is an important physical phenomenon especially in the high speed and high temperature flow regime making its application important in space exploration vehicles. This paper presents the development and validation of computational tools for modeling the radiative heat transfer with an aim that the developed numerical module can be either employed by itself or coupled with a computational fluid dynamics solver to analyze aerothermodynamics environment of space exploration vehicles. A generalized grid based finite volume method is used for solving the radiative heat transfer equation. Solution of the radiative heat transfer equations in angular domain is carried out in a parallel environment. This numerical approach is validated with different benchmark test cases for gray gas radiation in irregular geometries. To enable the simulation of non-gray gas radiation, the full spectrum correlated-k model is implemented. A grid sensitivity study is conducted to analyze the dependency of mesh resolution on solution accuracy. The results of the validation studies, grid sensitivity studies, and parallel performance of the implementation are presented in this paper.