RADIATIVE EXCHANGE BETWEEN SQUARE PARALLEL CHANNELS IN A CONCENTRIC MONOLITH STRUCTURE

The use of catalytic monoliths in high temperature combustion applicat ions means that heat exchange by radiation plays an important role. In itially, this paper derives the system of integral equations that is u sed to model radiative exchange in a catalytic monolith with square or circular channels. Since the system is often coupled with a complex s ystem of differential and algebraic equations that models channel inte raction and other processes in the catalytic combustor, a simple appro ximation to the integral equations is introduced to make the problem t ractable. The approximation technique is compared, first with the nume rical solution of the integral equation for a cylindrical single chann el, and second with published data for a simple cavity. The results of these two exercises show that the integral equation system and its ap proximation yield similar results to other workers and hence are appro priate for the modelling situation.