Volume Penalization Method for Solving Coupled Radiative-Conductive Heat Transfer Problems in Complex Geometries

Abstract

A novel immersed boundary method for simulating coupled radiative-conductive heat transfer based on a volume penalization method is proposed and vefified. A smooth source/sink term is introduced to the governing equations for radiative and conductive heat transfer in order to take into account the absorption, reflection and emission at a solid surface. The proposed algorithm is successfully implemented into an open-source CFD solver, OpenFOAM with adaptive mesh refinement to guarantee sufficiently fine grid resolution near solid surfaces. Benchmark problems of pure radiation and combined conduction-radiation are considered for the verification of the proposed method. The present simulation results under various absorption and emission conditions show good agreement with analytical solutions as well as existing literature data. In addition to its superior performance in terms of accuracy, the present approach does not require special treatments around the solid surface with arbitrary complex geometry to impose boundary conditions  for radiative heat transfer, and thereby wide applicability in scientific and engineering problems.

Keywords: Radiation, Numerical simulation, volume penalization method