Natural element method for radiative heat transfer in a semitransparent medium with irregular geometries

This paper develops a numerical solution to the radiative heat transfer problem coupled with conduction in an absorbing, emitting and isotropically scattering medium with the irregular geometries using the natural element method (NEM). The walls of the enclosures, having temperature and mixed boundary conditions, are considered to be opaque, diffuse as well as gray. The NEM as a meshless method is a new numerical scheme in the field of computational mechanics. Different from most of other meshless methods such as element-free Galerkin method or those based on radial basis functions, the shape functions used in NEM are constructed by the natural neighbor interpolations, which are strictly interpolant and the essential boundary conditions can be imposed directly. The natural element solutions in dealing with the coupled heat transfer problem for the mixed boundary conditions have been validated by comparison with those from Monte Carlo method (MCM) generated by the authors. For the validation of the NEM solution to radiative heat transfer in the semicircular medium with an inner circle, the results by NEM have been compared with those reported in the literatures. For pure radiative transfer, the upwind scheme is employed to overcome the oscillatory behavior of the solutions in some conditions. The steady state and transient heat transfer problem combined with radiation and conduction in the semicircular enclosure with an inner circle are studied. Effects of various parameters such as the extinction coefficient, the scattering albedo, the conduction–radiation parameter and the boundary emissivity are analyzed on the radiative and conductive heat fluxes and transient temperature distributions.