An approximate solution is presented for a class of radiative heat transfer problems within enclosures having black or diffuse-gray surfaces based on a modified Taylor series expansion method; such radiative transfer problems are generally represented by integral equations. The approach avoids use of any boundary/initial conditions associated with the original Taylor series expansion method and leads to an approximate solution in a simple closed form to the radiant integral equations, which can be computed straightforwardly on a modern personal computer using symbolic computing codes such as Maple. The method can be effectively and efficiently applied to deal with enclosures involving more than one or two surfaces, for which direct numerical integration may be subject to instability, or require an excessive amount of computation. The computed numerical results for representative thermal problems are in excellent agreement with those obtained by other numerical approaches. [S0022-1481(00)00203-6]

Issue Section:
Technical Notes
Keywords:
Computational Heat Transfer, Numerical Methods, radiative transfer, heat radiation, integral equations, series (mathematics)
Topics:
Approximation, Radiative heat transfer, Integral equations
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