The effect of the number of wavebands used in spectral radiation heat transfer calculations

A spectral radiation heat transfer model that conserves emitted and absorbed energy has been developed and used to model the combustion space of an industrial glass furnace. This comprehensive radiation heat transfer model coupled with a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code was used to investigate the effect of spectral dependencies on the computed results. The results of this work clearly indicate the need for a spectral approach as opposed to a gray body approach since the gray body approach (one waveband) severely underestimates the energy emitted via radiation