Zonal modeling of radiative heat transfer in industrial furnaces using simplified model for exchange area calculation

The zonal analysis of industrial furnaces is considered with three-dimensional radiative heat transfer, incorporated with the mathematical zone method. In this method exchange areas are determined by simplified numerical integration in three dimensions for surface-surface, surface-gas and gas–gas zones for absorbing and emitting media. By focusing on new strategies to overcome the drawbacks of evaluating direct exchange areas, it is shown that the zone method is an effective numerical method for modeling three-dimensional thermal performance of gas-filled enclosures. Also the developed method for evaluating of exchange area is presented and compared with other methods in both sides of CPU time and accuracy. The method can decrease about 70% in error of calculation of some exchange areas as compared with the other numerical methods.