COMBINED RADIATIVE -CONDUCTIVE HEAT TRANSFER IN TWODIMENSIONAL COMPLEX GEOMETRIES WITH VARIABLE THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY

This article deals with a simple Cartesian practical method named blocked-off procedure to study the steady state combined conductive-radiative heat transfer in two-dimensional irregular geometries. Using this technique, both straight and curvilinear boundaries can be treated. The finite-volume method is employed to solve the energy equation and the discrete ordinates method (DOM) is used to solve the radiative transfer equation (RTE) to obtain the temperature and radiative-conductive heat flux distributions inside the participating medium. The walls of enclosures are opaque, diffuse and gray with specified temperatures. The medium was considered to be absorbing-emitting and isotropic scattering with variable thermal conductivity. In the case of constant thermal conductivity, results have been compared with those reported in the literature. The major part of this work is to investigate the effects of variable thermal conductivity on the thermal characteristics of radiative-conductive systems.