Scalable photon Monte Carlo algorithms and software for the solution of radiative heat transfer problems

Abstract

Radiative heat transfer plays a central role in many combustion and engineering applications. Because of its highly nonlinear and nonlocal nature, the computational cost can be extremely high to model radiative heat transfer effects accurately. In this paper, we present a parallel software framework for distributed memory architectures that implements the photon Monte Carlo method of ray tracing to simulate radiative effects. Our primary focus is on applications such as fluid flow problems in which radiation plays a significant role, such as in combustion. We demonstrate the scalability of the framework for two representative combustion test problems, and address the load balancing, problem resulting from widely varying physical properties such as optical thickness. This framework allows for the incorporation of other, user-specified radiative properties, which should enable its use within a wide variety of other applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.