Effects of Radiative Transfer Modeling on Transient Temperature Distribution in Semitransparent Glass Rod

This paper presents a method of modeling the radiative energy transfer that takes place during the transient of joining two concentric, semitransparent glass cylinders. Specifically, we predict the two-dimensional transient temperature and heat flux distributions to a ramp input which advances the cylinders into a furnace at high temperature. In this paper, we discretize the fully conservative form of two-dimensional Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE) in both curvilinear and cylindrical coordinate systems so that it can be used for arbitrary axisymmetric cylindrical geometry. We compute the transient temperature field using both the Discrete Ordinate Method (DOM) and the widely used Rosseland’s approximation. The comparison shows that Rosseland’s approximation fails badly near the gap inside the glass media and when the radiative heat flux is dominant at short wavelengths where the spectral absorption coefficient is relatively small. Most prior studies of optical fiber drawing processes at the melting point (generally used Myers’ two-step band model at room temperature) neglect the effects of the spectral absorption coefficient at short wavelengths λ<3μm. In this study, we suggest a modified band model that includes the glass absorption coefficient in the short-wavelength band. Our results show that although the spectral absorption coefficient at short wavelengths is relatively small, its effects on the temperature and heat flux are considerable.