FINITE-ELEMENT MODELING OF RADIATION HEAT-TRANSFER COUPLED WITH CONDUCTION IN AN ADAPTIVE METHOD

The study deals with the finite-element modeling of radiation coupled with diffusion heat transfer. In many engineering problems, radiation occurs at the field boundary, where transfer is purely conductive. Tra ditional resolutions of such problems use the lumped radiosity method by delimiting the field into isothermal surfaces. This isothermal assu mption implies the use of very refined meshes. An alternative simple m ethod suppresses this isothermal restriction by integrating the Fredho lm integral from directly slower but more accurate. In this work we pr esent a hybrid method that uses both approaches, isothermal approximat ion and direct integration. This leads to a faster method that is easy to introduce into a finite-element code.