Gray and multigroup radiation transport through 3D binary stochastic media with different sphere radii distributions

•Gray and multigroup radiation transport is done through 3D stochastic media.•Four different radii distributions are used for the randomly place spheres.•The mean chord lengths for the spheres and background are held constant.•The mean energy density and temperature are insensitive to radii distributions.•The 3D transport results are very similar to 2D disk stochastic media transport.

Gray and multigroup radiation is transported through 3D media consisting of spheres randomly placed in a uniform background. Comparisons are made between using constant radii spheres and three different distributions of sphere radii. Because of the computational cost of 3D calculations, only the lowest angle order, n=1, is tested. If the mean chord length is held constant, using different radii distributions makes little difference. This is true for both gray and multigroup solutions. 3D transport solutions are compared to 2D and 1D solutions with the same mean chord lengths. 2D disk and 3D sphere media give solutions that are nearly identical while 1D slab solutions are fundamentally different.