A theoretical study of radiation between two concentric spheres using a modified discrete ordinates method associated with Legendre transform

A modified discrete ordinates method (DOM) is used in spherical participating media. The radiative intensity is broken up into two components. One component is traced back to the enclosure's source. It is called direct intensity. The other component is rather traced back to the contribution of the medium itself. It is called diffuse intensity. Thus, the radiative transfer equation (RTE) is transformed into two simultaneous equations: a direct RTE and a diffuse RTE. The direct RTE is solved analytically. The diffuse RTE is solved numerically using the DOM. The streaming angular derivative term appearing in spherical geometry is modeled by making use of the Finite Legendre Transform. We study a pure radiation transfer problem between two concentric spheres. The medium is assumed to be gray and isotropically scattering. The limiting spheres are considered to be opaque, gray, diffusely emitting and diffusely reflecting with uniform emissivity over each surface. The obtained results are compared with available cases reported in the literature. In particular, relative importance of the direct radiation in optically thin media is studied.     

A quasi-analytic solution of the radiative transfer equation for three-dimensional atmospheres

In this study, we present a new solution of the three-dimensional (3-D) radiation transfer equation (RTE). The solution employs a discretization technique to separate the independent variables involved in the 3-D RTE, and the doubling-adding method to solve the RTE explicitly and quasi-analytically. The remarkable feature of the present solution is the application of scaling-function expansion to those terms that are dependent on horizontal coordinates. Scaling-function expansion is suitable for representing irregular horizontal inhomogeneities with small-scale variations. By applying scaling-function expansion, the 3-D RTE can be formulated in the form of a vector-matrix differential equation; matrices involved in the equation are generally sparse and dominantly diagonal matrices, and this considerably reduces the labor involved in matrix calculations. We tested the performance of the present solution via radiative transfer calculations of solar radiation in horizontally inhomogeneous two-dimensional cloud models. The calculated results indicate that even if the resolution of the scaling-function expansion is too coarse in regions around small-scale variations, the influence does not spread problematically to other regions far from the variations; this illustrates the advantage of the scaling-function expansion. The present solution can be used to investigate quantitatively and to estimate the effects of cloud spatial inhomogeneity on the corresponding radiation field.     

Multilayer modeling of radiative transfer by SLW and CW methods in non-isothermal gaseous medium

Non-isothermal gaseous medium is modeled using the multilayer approach, breaking the one-dimensional system into a series of isothermal layers. Spectral integration of the radiative transfer equation (RTE) is performed for the spectral line weighted-sum-of-gray-gases and cumulative wavenumber approaches to modeling the spectral nature of the gas radiation. An exact analytical solution of RTE is obtained for the layers with both black and gray walls. Predictions show high accuracy, even with surprisingly few layers.     

Modified finite volume method applied to radiative transfer in 2D complex geometries and graded index media

A modified finite volume method with unstructured triangular meshes is proposed to solve the RTE in 2D complex geometries and for graded index media. In such media, the RTE has an additional term corresponding to “angular redistribution”. This term is due to the change in the orientation of the direction of propagation for the radiation along curved optical paths. Some benchmark cases applied to a slab (1D) and a square cavity (2D) with linear and nonlinear refractive graded index are used to validate the new method. New results are presented for a disk with radial graded index.     

Multiple scattering of light transmission in a smoke layer

The visibility in a fire scene decreases because of the existence of smoke produced by the flammable materials. With the growth of smoke concentration, the relationship between light and smoke becomes complicated due to the multiple scattering. In this paper, the radiative transfer equation (RTE) that considers the multiple scattering was applied to calculate the light transmission in a smoke layer. As input parameters of RTE, the single scattering albedo, asymmetry parameter and extinction cross section of single smoke agglomerate were calculated by the discrete dipole approximation (DDA) method. The effects of smoke agglomerate diameter, number density of smoke layer, and the incident light wavelength were considered. The results show that the light transmitted flux decreases with the growth of smoke diameter and number density, and increases with the growth of wavelength. The smoke diameter is dominant among the three parameters, and the light transmitted flux tends to be stable when the wavelength reaches a certain value.     

Radiative and conductive heat transfer in a nongrey semitransparent medium. Application to fire protection curtains

This paper deals with heat transfer in nongrey media which scatter, absorb and emit radiation. Considering a two dimensional geometry, radiative and conductive phenomena through the medium have been taken into account. The radiative part of the problem was solved using the discrete ordinate method with classical S_n quadratures. The absorption and scattering coefficients involved in the radiative transfer equation (RTE) were obtained from the Mie theory. Conduction inside the medium was linked to the RTE through the energy conservation. Validation of the model has been achieved with several simulation of water spray curtains used as fire protection walls.     

耦合辐射的三维热化学非平衡流数值模拟

发展耦合辐射的三维热化学非平衡流场计算方法,可用于非结构网格.采用Jameson有限体积法求解耦合辐射源项的三维N-S方程.辐射源项通过求解辐射输运方程(Radiative Transport Equation RTE)获得.在空间方向上离散后,采用有限体积法求解辐射输运方程.化学模型包含11个组元,20个化学反应.采用该数值方法计算MUSES-C模型在速度为11.6 km·s^-1时的绕流流场及前驻点处的辐射热流密度.并通过对比,分析热辐射对流场的影响.     

Evaluation of solution methods for radiative heat transfer in gaseous oxy-fuel combustion environments

The exact solution to radiative heat transfer in combusting flows is not possible analytically due to the complex nature of the integro-differential radiative transfer equation (RTE). Many different approximate solution methods for the solution of the RTE in multi-dimensional problems are available. In this paper, two of the principal methods, the spherical harmonics (P₁) and the discrete ordinates method (DOM) are used to calculate radiation. The radiative properties of the gases are calculated using a non-gray gas full spectrum k-distribution method and a gray method. Analysis of the effects of numerical quadrature in the DOM and its effect on computation time is performed. Results of different radiative property methods are compared with benchmark statistical narrow band (SNB) data for both cases that simulate air combustion and oxy-fuel combustion. For both cases, results of the non-gray full spectrum k-distribution method are in good agreement with the SNB data. In the case of oxy-fuel simulations with high partial pressures of carbon dioxide, use of gray method for the radiative properties may cause errors and should be avoided.     

Directional radiometry and radiative transfer: A new paradigm

Measurements with directional radiometers and calculations based on the radiative transfer equation (RTE) have been at the very heart of weather and climate modeling and terrestrial remote sensing. The quantification of the energy budget of the Earth's climate system requires exquisite measurements and computations of the incoming and outgoing electromagnetic energy, while global characterization of climate system's components relies heavily on theoretical inversions of observational data obtained with various passive and active instruments. The same basic problems involving electromagnetic energy transport and its use for diagnostic and characterization purposes are encountered in numerous other areas of science, biomedicine, and engineering. Yet both the discipline of directional radiometry and the radiative transfer theory (RTT) have traditionally been based on phenomenological concepts many of which turn out to be profound misconceptions. Contrary to the widespread belief, a collimated radiometer does not, in general, measure the flow of electromagnetic energy along its optical axis, while the specific intensity does not quantify the amount of electromagnetic energy transported in a given direction.The recently developed microphysical approach to radiative transfer and directional radiometry is explicitly based on the Maxwell equations and clarifies the physical nature of measurements with collimated radiometers and the actual content of the RTE. It reveals that the specific intensity has no fundamental physical meaning besides being a mathematical solution of the RTE, while the RTE itself is nothing more than an intermediate auxiliary equation. Only under special circumstances detailed in this review can the solution of the RTE be used to compute the time-averaged local Poynting vector as well as be measured by a collimated radiometer. These firmly established facts make the combination of the RTE and a collimated radiometer useful in a well-defined range of applications. However, outside the domain of validity of the RTT the practical usefulness of measurements with collimated radiometers remains uncertain, while the theoretical modeling of these measurements and the solution of the energy-budget problem require a more sophisticated approach than solving the RTE.     

Comparison of the radiative transfer equations for constant and spatially varying refraction

The radiative transfer equation for scattering media with constant refraction index (RTE) and the radiative transfer equation for scattering media with spatially varying refraction index (RTEvri) are compared by using the principle of conservation of energy. It is shown that the RTEvri, not only accounts for the spatial variations of refraction index, but also contains a term that accounts for the divergence of the rays. The latter term is missing in the RTE. A corrected RTE is proposed.     

High fidelity radiative heat transfer models for high-pressure laminar hydrogen–air diffusion flames

Radiative heat transfer is studied numerically for high-pressure laminar H₂–air jet diffusion flames, with pressure ranging from 1 to 30 bar. Water vapour is assumed to be the only radiatively participating species. Two different radiation models are employed, the first being the full spectrum k-distribution model together with conventional Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE) solvers. Narrowband k-distributions of water vapour are calculated and databased from the HITEMP 2010 database, which claims to retain accuracy up to 4000 K. The full-spectrum k-distributions are assembled from their narrowband counterparts to yield high accuracy with little additional computational cost. The RTE is solved using various spherical harmonics methods, such as P₁, simplified P₃ (SP₃) and simplified P₅ (SP₅). The resulting partial differential equations as well as other transport equations in the laminar diffusion flames are discretized with the finite-volume method in OpenFOAM^®. The second radiation model is a Photon Monte Carlo (PMC) method coupled with a line-by-line spectral model. The PMC absorption coefficient database is derived from the same spectroscopy database as the k-distribution methods. A time blending scheme is used to reduce PMC calculations at each time step. Differential diffusion effects, which are important in laminar hydrogen flames, are also included in the scalar transport equations. It was found that the optically thin approximation overpredicts radiative heat loss at elevated pressures. Peak flame temperature is less affected by radiation because of faster chemical reactions at high pressures. Significant cooling effects are observed at downstream locations. As pressure increases, the performance of RTE models starts to deviate due to increased optical thickness. SP_N models perform only marginally better than P₁ because P₁ is adequate except at very high pressure.     

Dynamic control of the terahertz rainbow trapping effect based on a silicon-filled graded grating

We theoretically propose a scheme to realize the dynamic control of the properties of the terahertz(THz) rainbow trapping effect(RTE) based on a silicon-filled graded grating(SFGG) in a relatively broad band via optical pumping.Through the theoretical analysis and finite-element method simulations, it is conceptually demonstrated that the band of the RTE can be dynamically tuned in a range of ~0.06 THz. Furthermore, the SFGG can also be optically switched between a device for the RTE and a waveguide for releasing the trapped waves. The results obtained here may imply applications for the tunable THz plasmonic devices, such as on-chip optical buffers, broad band slow-light systems, and integrated optical filters.     

On the combined heat transfer in the multilayer non-gray porous fibrous insulation

A detailed numerical modeling is performed to investigate coupled heat transfer of natural convection, radiation and conduction in high-temperature multilayer thermal insulation (MTI), which consists of high-porous, non-gray semitransparent fibrous materials and reflective foils. Radiation within fibers, radiation between fibers and the reflective foils, conduction within fibers and convection from the fibers to the surrounding fluid are considered. Macroscopic (porous media) modeling is used to determine velocity, pressure and temperatures fields for fibrous insulation with a random packing geometry under natural convection, whereas the radiative transfer equation (RTE) is used to solve the radiative heat flux for non-gray materials. Key features of the macroscopic model include two-dimensional effects, non-gray radiative exchange, and the relaxation of the local thermodynamic non-equilibrium (LTNE). This model was validated by comparison with experimental data and it was used to investigate natural convection of coupled heat transfer in multilayer insulation, numerical results showed that natural convection is more likely to occur when the heated/cooled rate is low, while natural convection can be ignored in simulating steady-state coupled heat transfer in MTI.     

Refractive index imaging from radiative transfer equation-based reconstruction algorithm: Fundamentals

We present the first reconstruction algorithm for refractive index imaging, which is based on the radiative transfer equation (RTE). An objective function is iteratively minimized to find a solution to the problem of inversion of the refractive index field. The function describes the discrepancies of the emerging light measurements on the surface of the sample to be probed with predicted data from the corresponding numerical model. The unknown refractive index field is updated within each reconstruction iteration according to a search direction on the index distribution given by the adjoint model to the RTE. In this paper, emphasis is placed on the theoretical aspects. Preliminary tests are demonstrated on generic phantoms.     

Effect of radiative transfer of heat released from combustion reaction on temperature distribution: A numerical study for a 2-D system

Both light and heat are produced during a chemical reaction in a combustion process, but traditionally all the energy released is taken as to be transformed into the internal energy of the combustion medium. So the temperature of the medium increases, and then the thermal radiation emitted from it increases too. Chemiluminescence is generated during a chemical reaction and independent of the temperature, and has been used widely for combustion diagnostics. It was assumed in this paper that the total energy released in a combustion reaction is divided into two parts, one part is a self-absorbed heat, and the other is a directly emitted heat. The former is absorbed immediately by the products, becomes the internal energy and then increases the temperature of the products as treated in the traditional way. The latter is emitted directly as radiation into the combustion domain and should be included in the radiation transfer equation (RTE) as a part of radiation source. For a simple, 2-D, gray, emitting-absorbing, rectangular system, the numerical study showed that the temperatures in reaction zones depended on the fraction of the directly emitted energy, and the smaller the gas absorption coefficient was, the more strong the dependence appeared. Because the effect of the fraction of the directly emitted heat on the temperature distribution in the reacting zones for gas combustion is significant, it is required to conduct experimental measurements to determine the fraction of self-absorbed heat for different combustion processes.     

Effect of the reflection of underlying surface on sky radiance distribution

Sky radiance might be influenced by the multiple reflectance between the earth's albedo surface and the atmosphere. Based on the Lambert's law and the radiative transfer equation (RTE), a model is developed to calculate the additional sky radiance at wavelengths of 0.4-3 μm due to the reflectance contribution of the underlying surface. The iterative method is used to calculate sky radiance without the reflectance from underlying surface. The hybrid modified delta-Eddington approximation is used to compute the atmospheric reflection of the radiation from the earth's surface. An interaction factor is introduced to deal with the multiple reflectance between the atmosphere and the underlying surface. The sky radiance increment is evaluated for some different albedos of the earth's surface. The results show that the sky radiance increment rises rapidly while viewing zenith angle is near to 90°, and the larger the albedo of the earth's surface is, the more obvious this effect appears.     

Light reflection from a rough liquid surface including wind-wave effects in a scattering atmosphere

Visible and near-IR images of the ocean surface, taken from remote satellites, often contain important information of near-surface or sub-surface processes, which occur on, or over the ocean. Remote measurements of near surface winds, sea surface temperature and salinity, ocean color and underwater bathymetry, all, one way or another, depend on how well we understand sea surface roughness. However, in order to extract useful information from our remote measurements, we need to construct accurate models of the transfer of solar radiation inside the atmosphere as well as, its reflection from the sea surface. To approach this problem, we numerically solve the radiative transfer equation (RTE) by implementing a model for the atmosphere-ocean system. A one-dimensional atmospheric radiation model is solved via the widely known doubling and adding method and the ocean body is treated as a boundary condition to the problem. The ocean surface is modeled as a rough liquid surface which includes wind interaction and wave states, such as wave age. The model can have possible applications to the retrieval of wind and wave states, such as wave age, near a Sun glint region.     

Accurate and efficient Monte Carlo solutions to the radiative transport equation in the spatial frequency domain

We present an approach to solving the radiative transport equation (RTE) for layered media in the spatial frequency domain (SFD) using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. This is done by obtaining a complex photon weight from analysis of the Fourier transform of the RTE. We also develop a modified shortcut method that enables a single MC simulation to efficiently provide RTE solutions in the SFD for any number of spatial frequencies. We provide comparisons between the modified shortcut method and conventional discrete transform methods for SFD reflectance. Further results for oblique illumination illustrate the potential diagnostic utility of the SFD phase-shifts for analysis of layered media.     

A simplified CFD model for spectral radiative heat transfer in high-pressure hydrocarbon–air combustion systems

Detailed radiation modeling in piston engines has received relatively little attention to date. Recently, it is being revisited in light of current trends towards higher operating pressures and higher levels of exhaust-gas recirculation (EGR), both of which enhance molecular gas radiation. Advanced high-efficiency engines also are expected to function closer to the limits of stable operation, where even small perturbations to the energy balance can have a large influence on system behavior. Detailed radiation modeling using sophisticated tools like photon Monte Carlo/line-by-line (PMC/LBL) is computationally expensive. Here, guided by results from PMC/LBL, a simplified stepwise-gray spectral model in combination with a first-order spherical harmonics (P1 method) radiative transfer equation (RTE) solver is proposed and tested for engine-relevant conditions. Radiative emission, reabsorption and radiation reaching the walls are computed for a heavy-duty compression-ignition engine at part-load and full-load operating conditions with different levels of EGR and soot. The results are compared with those from PMC/LBL, P1/FSK (P1 with a full-spectrum k-distribution spectral model) and P1/Gray radiation models to assess the proposed model’s accuracy and computational cost. The results show that the proposed P1/StepwiseGray model can calculate reabsorption locally and globally with less than 10% error (with respect to PMC/LBL) at a small fraction of the computational cost of PMC/LBL (a factor of 30) and P1/FSK (a factor of 15). In contrast, error in computed reabsorption by the P1/Gray model is as high as 60%. It is expected that the simplified model should be broadly applicable to high-pressure hydrocarbon–air combustion systems, with or without soot.     

Numerical prediction of heat transfer by natural convection and radiation in an enclosure filled with an isotropic scattering medium

This paper deals with the numerical solution for natural convection and volumetric radiation in an isotropic scattering medium within a heated square cavity using a hybrid thermal lattice Boltzmann method (HTLBM). The multiple relaxation time lattice Boltzmann method (MRT-LBM) has been coupled to the finite difference method (FDM) to solve momentum and energy equations, while the discrete ordinates method (DOM) has been adopted to solve the radiative transfer equation (RTE) using the S8 quadrature. Based on these approaches, the effects of various influencing parameters such as the Rayleigh number (Ra), the wall emissivity (ε_ι), the Planck number (Pl), and the scattering albedo (ω), have been considered. The results presented in terms of isotherms, streamlines and averaged Nusselt number, show that in absence of radiation, the temperature and the flow fields are centro-symmetrics and the cavity core is thermally stratified. However, radiation causes an overall increase in the temperature and velocity gradients along both thermally active walls. The maximum heat transfer rate is obtained when the surfaces of the enclosure walls are regarded as blackbodies. It is also seen that the scattering medium can generate a multicellular flow.