A Vector Form Exchange-Area-Based Method for Computation of Anisotropic Radiative Transfer

Exchange-area-based methods (EAMs), such as the zonal method, the combined Monte-Carlo and zonal method, etc., are widely used in the numerical computation of thermal radiative transfer. In view of their inefficiency in treating with the anisotropy of radiation, researchers have been devoted to developing generalized models (GEAMs). In this article a vector form GEAM is proposed, which has concise formulations, and is found to be very efficient for handling the anisotropic scattering and reflection. In the model some vectorlike weighted-summations take account of the directional distribution of radiant energy. The summations give rise to correction coefficients to the radiosities. The heat transfer problem is solved by a coupled computation of the radiosities and the correction coefficients. The model was validated by both a one-dimensional and a three-dimensional benchmark radiation problem. The computational time is decreased to an order of that for computing isotropic radiation by conventional EAM. Such high efficency has never been achieved by the GEAMs proposed to date.