Finite volume method for radiative heat transfer in an unstructured flow solver for emitting, absorbing and scattering media

Abstract

This paper presents the implementation of the finite volume method to solve the radiative transfer equation in a commercial code. The particularity of this work is that the method applied on unstructured hexahedral meshes does not need a pre-processing step establishing a particular marching order to visit all the control volumes. The solver simply visits the faces of the control volumes as numbered in the hexahedral unstructured mesh. A cell centred mesh and a spatial differencing step scheme to relate facial radiative intensities to nodal intensities is used. The developed computer code based on FVM has been integrated in the CFD solver FINE™/Open from NUMECA Int. Radiative heat transfer can be evaluated within systems containing uniform, grey, emitting, absorbing and/or isotropically or linear anisotropically scattering medium bounded by diffuse grey walls. This code has been validated for three test cases. The first one is a three dimensional rectangular enclosure filled with emitting, absorbing and anisotropically scattering media. The second is the differentially heated cubic cavity. The third one is the L-shaped enclosure. For these three test cases a good agreement has been observed when temperature and heat fluxes predictions are compared with references taken, from literature.