Combined conductive and radiative heat transfer in an anisotropic scattering participating medium with irregular geometries

This paper deals with the numerical solution for the steady state combined conductive-radiative heat transfer in an anisotropic participating medium within the irregular geometries using the blocked-off method in Cartesian coordinates. The walls of the enclosures were considered to be opaque, diffuse and gray having specified heat flux and temperature boundary conditions. The finite-volume method has been adopted to solve the energy equation and the discrete ordinates method has been employed to solve the radiative transfer equation. The radiative and radiative-conducive models were validated by comparison with the results of specific test cases taken from the literature. The results showed very satisfactory predictions compared with the benchmarked results. As the degree of enclosure complexity (with curved or skewed walls) increased, finer grids were required. Based on this method, the effects of various influencing parameters such as the conduction-radiation parameter, scattering albedo and extinction coefficient have been considered. (C) 2009 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.