Coupling a Discrete Transfer Method to a View Factors Technique for Radiative Heat Transfer Modeling in Industrial Furnaces

Air Liquide has been involved in the design of industrial furnaces (glass melting, reheating, aluminum, …) for several years. Thanks to that experience, known-how and expertise in modeling such applications have been developed. Dedicated simulation tools — 0D for global heat and mass balance, 1D for the prediction of longitudinal temperature profiles and 3D for detailed analysis — have been built. Each of them is very helpful when used relevantly and offers numerous opportunities at each step of the design of a furnace. In such kind of applications, the temperature levels are very high (up to 2500 K). As a consequence it is very crucial to simulate the radiative heat transfer as accurately as possible. This requires the use of a radiation model that can take into account complex geometries, non-isothermal media and various gas mixture compositions. Very often, three-dimensional simulations are necessary and reduction to smaller dimension problems is difficult or inadequate. The present paper introduces a new radiation model for computing two-dimensionally radiative heat transfer in an industrial furnace with a piecewise distributed load. To reduce the three-dimensional problem to two dimensions, the method consists in coupling the 2D radiation transport equation to a boundary condition based on view factors through an imaginary plane to homogenize the radiative behavior of the load surface. A solution procedure using the discrete transfer method associated to a weighted-sum-of-gray-gases database to deal with absorption and emission of a CO2-H2O mixture is proposed. Simulation results are finally compared to an analytical formula and then to a full-3D approach taking into account participating media, non-isothermal and gray walls. All tests show that this model can be used to simulate industrial configurations with a good accuracy.