The angular discretization impact of thermal radiation computations on heat transfer in rooms

Abstract

The objective of this study is to evaluate the accuracy of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulations for airflows driven by buoyancy in heated real scale rooms. In addition, this study is focusing on the influence of angular discretization used for thermal radiation computations in CFD modeling. The numerical results are compared with experimental data from the literature, based on investigations dealing with thermal coupling-room-electric heat sources‖, using full scale test cells. The results show that there is no sensitivity of radiative heat flux to the walls of the room to angular discretization used in the radiation model. This means that for simple geometries, minimum angular discretization can be used for the radiation model in CFD simulations, leading to important savings in CPU (Central Processing Unit) time. Nevertheless, this deduction must be checked by further work for other configurations.