Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.
This paper presents work on developing methods for analyzing radiative heat transfer between diffuse-gray surfaces using finite elements and it's experimental validation. The work was motivated by a thermal analysis of vehicle platforms. In infra-red signature prediction the thermal characteristics of an aircraft for a given flight condition, including its exhaust gas flow must be determined. A few methods for calculating face-to-face radiation such as several variations of the general named Radiosity method have been introduced in recent years. Also, a few methods based on multiple reflections have been introduced since 1960's. The method proposed in this paper presents a combination of simple Radiosity face to face method and multiple reflections and is called Multiple Reflection of View Factors (MRV) method. The method was tested on a simple testing rig. Thermo-physical properties of the samples including density, thermal conductivity, emissivity and reflectivity used in experiments were measured and presented in the paper.
The view factors were obtained using the Hemi-cube method combined with the finite element (FE) technique. Afterwards, when view factors between all elements are calculated the multiple reflections of view factors is applied.
