Transient heat transfer in a spherical protective material, submitted to flux and mixed boundary conditions: an investigation on zirconia

An analytic solution is presented for describing combined radiation and conduction heat transfer in a spherical fiber thermal protection exposed to combined radiative and convective heating. The solution includes the equation of radiative transfer within the material, coupled to a transient energy equation that contains both radiative and convective terms. At elevated temperatures radiative transfer becomes important, and if several hot surfaces view each other, the radiation exchange process must be considered carefully. Some thermal protections are partially transparent to thermal radiation. Hence, an exchange process is complicated by radiation penetrating into and coming out of material. The radiation leaving an area depends on the temperature distribution inside that area and that is unknown and is affected by the exchange process to other areas. The analysis has allowed for unlimited spectral detail but assumes that the various material properties do not vary significantly with temperature. Transient temperature distributions are obtained for the boundary conditions of external radiation and convection. The present analysis includes the influence of reflectivity, surface radiative properties and spectral properties on the temperature distributions.