ARTICLE:

• THE ZONAL METHOD: A PRACTICAL SOLUTION METHOD FOR RADIATIVE TRANSFER IN NONISOTHERMAL INHOMOGENEOUS MEDIA  download article

Walter W. Yuen
Department of Mechanical and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, СА 93106

Ezra E. Takara
Department of Meteorology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742

ABSTRACT

This is a comprehensive review of the zonal method. In addition to presenting the fundamentals of the method, sufficient details and numerical data are included so that this work can serve as a "user guide" of the method for practical applications. A review of the mathematical properties of the exchange factor indicates that the traditional "diffusion approximation" of radiative heat flux when expressed in finite difference form is in error even in the optically thick limit. Illustrative examples are presented to show the capability of the zonal method in simulating radiative heat transfer in inhomogeneous, nonisothermal media, including the effect of opaque obstructions. The method is extended to become the generalized zonal method (GZM) for applications in anisotropically scattering media. Numerical examples with small number of grid points are presented to demonstrate the capability of the method. With advances in parallel computing and large memory data storage and retrieval, GZM has excellent potential of becoming a practical approach for the analysis of radiative heat transfer in practical engineering systems.

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153-215 pages

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