Abstract
There have been increasing demands for a better thermal environment in air-conditioned spaces recently. The calculation of radiative heat transfer is indispensable in estimating the thermal comfort of an indoor environment, but conventional methods are not easily applicable to real living spaces because of furnitures placed and required accuracy for estimating human thermal sensation. This paper describes an improved numerical method for the analysis of radiative heat transfer that is proposed to calculate accurately for complicated geometry with reasonable computational time. We have proposed several methods that use fewer emitted rays for simulating radiative energy, and we have evaluated their performance by executing model calculations. As the result, the method of distributing emitting points by staggering allocated square patches shows the best performance and it makes possible the calculation about two times as fast as the conventional method. We have also considered to apply the method to the numerical flow analysis by using a rough mesh generated from a mesh for fluid calculation. The example calculations for an air-conditioning system which uses thermal radiation panels have been carried out to demonstrate the ability of the present method.
