APPLICATION OF THE HYBRID ZONE MONTE-CARLO METHOD TO 3-D CURVILINEAR GRIDS IN RADIATIVE HEAT-TRANSFER

The zone method is applied to non-orthogonal curvilinear grids for the computation of radiative heat transfer. The interchange areas are calculated by the Monte Carlo technique which has been fitted with a generalized ray tracing procedure. The method is applied to two complex three-dimensional (3-D) cases where inhomogeneities are present in the radiation space (non-uniform gas properties and/or shadowing effects), and the gas is taken as gray. For comparison purposes, the same examples are worked out with the discrete transfer method. Very small discrepancies are found between the two methods for the surface heat fluxes, but the gas volumetric radiative sources are much more sensitive to inhomogeneities in the gas phase, resulting in higher discrepancies for these terms. The method can be readily extended to incorporate real gases and scattering effects.