Textural parameters influencing the radiative properties of a semitransparent porous media

In the field of thermal radiation, a current key challenge is to understand the role played by the texture of semitransparent heterogeneous materials on their thermal radiative properties. This paper is restricted to the case of any porous materials endowed with spherical pores and for which their mean pore size is greater than the incident wavelength. In this work, an algorithm had been developed to elaborate porous silica glass with prescribed textural properties. The design of virtual pore's geometries was based on the textural investigation of a real porous glass, beforehand characterized by synchrotron x-ray mu-tomography. Then a Monte Carlo Ray Tracing code is carried out to predict the thermal radiative properties of the numerical samples. In this work, the solid phase of each sample is composed of silica of high chemical purity for which the optical functions are known. Lastly, for the spectral range where the numerical glasses are transparent, the roles played by both the porosity and the volumetric surface on the scattering behavior are discussed. (C) 2010 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.