The use of form factors in the treatment of radiant enclosures requires the radiosity be approximated as uniform over finite areas, and so when higher accuracy is required, an infinitesimal-area analysis should be applied. This paper describes a generic infinitesimal-area formulation suited in principle for any enclosure containing a transparent medium. The surfaces are first represented parametrically, through “non-uniform rational B-spline” (NURBS) functions, the industry standard in CAD-CAM codes. The kernel of the integral equation is obtained without user intervention, using NURBS algorithms, and then the integral equation is solved numerically. The resulting general-purpose code, which proceeds directly from surface specification to solution, is tested on problems taken from the literature.

Issue Section:
Radiative Heat Transfer
Keywords:
Heat Transfer, Numerical Methods, Radiation, radiative transfer, brightness, integral equations, splines (mathematics)
Topics:
Algorithms, Computers, Integral equations, Numerical analysis, Cylinders, Heat transfer, Temperature, B-splines, Radiation (Physics), Transparency
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Copyright © 2001
 by ASME
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