Computation of radiative properties in one-dimensional sphere packings for sintering applications

Rapid sintering is an important manufacturing process. Because of the rapid rise of the powder system to the sintering temperature, thermal gradients are typically induced in the system. This gradient can be important in determining the microstructure of the final product. To obtain the temperature distribution, the radiative properties such as the phase function, as well as the absorption and scattering coefficients, are required. Typically, the conjugate gradient method is utilized to acquire these properties. The method employs a minimization technique on a single-objective function composed of several sets of other parameters. Thus although this method has been shown to be useful in many situations, it may not be suitable for certain configurations. In the current study, another method is developed to compute the radiative properties. The phase function was removed from the objective function and computed separately. In addition, a dual-objective function technique was developed. The results from benchmarking showed the present technique not only to produce more accurate results than the conjugate gradient method, bat also to require significantly less computational time