Modelling of radiative heat transfer in participating media by the finite volume method

Thermal radiation plays an important role in many high temperature engineering systems. The modelling of radiative heat transfer is essential to the prediction of the thermal characteristics of these systems. Significant progress has been made in the development of radiation models. But the most advanced models to date still suffer severe limitations.;The further development of the Finite Volume Method in this work incorporates the treatment of anisotropic scattering, the formulation of an implicit solution scheme to accelerate solution time, and the application of the method in both geometrically three dimensional finite length cylindrical enclosures and two dimensional cavities with non-orthogonal boundary-fitted meshes. These achievements extend the applicability of the method in more complex systems and enhance the convergence behavior of the method in strongly participating media.;The test results of this work indicate that the Finite Volume Method produces good accuracy in the prediction of radiative heat transfer even on fairly coarse grids, and that solution errors reduce rapidly with grid refinement.;The newly formulated Finite Volume Method for modelling radiative heat transfer was designed to overcome some of the limitations experienced by the competing models. It was successfully implemented in one- and two-dimensional Cartesian enclosures with absorbing, emitting and isotropically scattering media. Conceptually, the method is able to handle realistic radiative properties, and can be applied with the same non-orthogonal computational grids used to compute fluid flow and convective heat transfer. The research objective of this work is to advance the development of this method.