Assessment of an unstructured exponential scheme discrete ordinates radiation model for non-gray media

For radiative transfer in complex geometries, Sakami and his co-workers have developed a discrete ordinates method (DOM) exponential scheme for unstructured meshes which was mainly applied to gray media. The present study investigates the application of the unstructured exponential scheme to a wider range of non-gray scenarios found in fire and combustion applications, with the goal to implement it in an in-house Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code for fire simulations. The original unstructured gray exponential scheme is adapted to non-gray applications by employing a statistical narrow-band/correlated-k (SNB-CK) gas model and meshes generated using the authors’ own mesh generator. Different non-gray scenarios involving spectral gas absorption by H₂O and CO₂ are investigated and a comparative analysis is carried out between heat flux and radiative source terms predicted and literature data based on ray-tracing and Monte Carlo methods. The maximum discrepancies for total radiative heat flux do not typically exceed 5%.