ENERGY REDISTRIBUTION IN CAVITIES BY THERMAL-RADIATION

A method has been developed to calculate the spatial temperature distribution on the interior wall of an arbitrarily shaped cavity in which the wall elements exchange energy by means of thermal radiation. The method is based on the separation of the geometrical problem of the radiant energy exchange processes from the detailed physics of reemission from a wall element heated by thermal radiation. The reemissive properties of the interior wall are self-consistently calculated using a self-similar solution to the space- and time-dependent planar hydrodynamics equations with radiative heat conduction. As an example, the application of the method to the case of the cylindrical cavity is presented. The relevance of the model to the inertial confinement approach to fusion and its usefulness as a cavity designing tool is discussed.