Comparison of numerical models in radiative heat transfer with application to circuit-breaker simulations

Two different modeling approaches for the numerical computation of the radiation energy exchange in the context of the simulation of high-voltage circuit breakers are investigated. These are the basic Radiative Transfer Equation method and the P1 model which are compared with respect to the modeling methodology and their predictive capabilities. For each of these two models, two distinct implementations, the present code and the commercial package Fluent, are compared to a classical analytical solution. A more demanding evaluation using a configuration exhibiting typical complex circuit breaker characteristics is presented with a critical assessment.