Finite volume method for non-equilibrium radiative heat transfer

Radiative heat transfer is an important physical phenomenon, especially in the high speed and high temperature flow regimes, making its application important in space exploration vehicles. This paper presents the development and validation of computational tools for modeling the radiative heat transfer that can be either employed by itself or coupled with a computational fluid dynamics solver to analyze aerothermodynamics environments. A generalized mesh is used for discretization of the spatial domain and a finite volume method is used for solving the radiative heat transfer equation. Solution of the radiative heat transfer equation in an angular domain is carried out in a parallel environment. This numerical approach is validated with different benchmark test cases for gray gas radiation in various geometries. To enable the simulation of non-gray gas radiation, the full spectrum correlated-k model is implemented into the radiation solver. A grid sensitivity study is conducted to analyze the dependency of mesh resolution in spatial and angular domains on solution accuracy. The results of the validation studies, grid sensitivity studies, and parallel performance of the implementation are presented in this paper. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.