Numerical analyses of radiative heat transfer in any arbitrarily-shaped axisymmetric enclosures

A numerical approach for the treatment of radiative heat transfer in any irregularly-shaped axisymmetric enclosure filled with absorbing, emitting and scattering gray media is developed. Radiative transfer equation (RTE) is formulated for a general axisymmetric geometrical configurations, and the discretized equation is conducted using an unstructured meshes, generated by an appropriate computer algorithm, and the control volume finite element method which frequently adopted in CFD problems. A computer procedure has been done to solve the discretized RTE and to examine the accuracy and the computational efficiency of the proposed numerical approach. By using this computer algorithm, five test cases, a cylindrical enclosure with absorbing and emitting medium, a diffuser shaped axisymmetric enclosure, a finite axisymmetric cylindrical enclosure with a curved wall, a furnace with axially varying medium temperature and a rocket nozzle, are treated and the obtained results agree very well with other published works. Furthermore, the developed computer procedure has an accurate CPU time and it can be coupled easily with CFD codes.