A Numerical Study of Radiative Heat Transfer in a Cylindrical Furnace by Using Finite Volume Method

In designing industrial cylindrical furnaces, it is important to predict the radiative heat flux on the wall with high accuracy. In this study, we consider CO₂ and H₂O which have strong absorption in the infrared range. The absorption coefficients of the gases are calculated by using the statistical narrow band (SNB) model. The spectrum is divided into 15 bands to cover all the absorption regions of the two non-gray gases. The radiative transfer equation is solved by the finite volume method (FVM) in cylindrical coordinates. To make the FVM more accurate, we discretize the solid angle into 80 directions with the S₈ approximation which is found to be both efficient and less time consuming. Based on the existing species and temperature fields, which were modeled by the FLUENT commercial code, the radiative heat transfer in a cylinder combustor is simulated by an in-house code. The results show that the radiative heat flux plays a dominant part of the heat flux to the wall. Meanwhile, when the gas is considered as nongray, the computational time is very huge. Therefore, a parallel algorithm is also applied to speed up the computing process.