A Numerical Treatment of One-dimensional Models of Radiative Heat Transfer in Co-current Tube Furnaces

A model of a top-fired furnace, such as is used in chemicalindustrial plants, is described. The model gives rise to a systemof first-order differential equations, with boundary conditionsat both the top and bottom of the furnace. This also involvesa non-linear coupling of the radiation field to the energy ofthe gases flowing. Published accounts of this problem make useof shooting methods which converge extremely slowly. An alternativemethod will be described in which the radiative field equationsare solved by an algorithm of Grant and, to deal with the non-linearitiesof the system, a generalized Newton-Raphson method is employed.