An Implementation of Surface-to-Surface, Blackbody Radiation Heat Transfer in a MOOSE Application
Abstract
Surface-to-surface, blackbody radiation heat transfer is a fundamental phenomena essential in the evaluation of some heat conduction problems. Representing it in digital simulations is of interest in the nuclear power industry in a variety of contexts. Some of these contexts include, but are not limited to: the analysis and design of micro- and space-reactors, the analysis of high- temperature surfaces present during severe accidents, etc. An open source MOOSE application, Phoenix, has been created and made freely available on github. The aim of this application is to provide modeling capabilities for problems that involve surface-to-surface, blackbody radiation heat transfer.
The work conducted for the completion of this thesis and in the construction of Phoenix includes:
•The incorporation of a vetted version of CGAL in the MOOSE application that is LGPL v3+ compliant. This allows for ray tracing capabilities provided by the trusted and broadly used library. This is leveraged for the view factor calculations.
• Development of a unit-test suite of 264 tests within the MOOSE app. This provides confidence in the correctness of the basic view factor calculations as the application is developed.
•Investigation into the appropriateness of quadrature-based integration in view factor calculations for a variety of geometrical configurations. This includes benchmarks of the generated solutions against analytic solutions or solutions reported in trusted literature.
• Integration of view factor calculations with the multi-physics capabilities in MOOSE.
• Implemention of surface-to-surface, blackbody radiation boundary conditions for heat conduction problems.
• Investigation and benchmarks of the capabilities for surface-to-surface, blackbody radiation boundary conditions.
By accomplishing these tasks an extensible and perhaps useful application for simulating surface-to-surface, blackbody radiation heat transfer is be freely available. Suggestions and direction for future work is discussed in the conclusion of the thesis.
Subject
blackbody radiationview factor
heat transfer
finite element
MOOSE
heat conduction
quadrature
CGAL
Citation
Franklin, Andrew Mark (2020). An Implementation of Surface-to-Surface, Blackbody Radiation Heat Transfer in a MOOSE Application. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /192275.