Radiant interchange between circular disks having arbitrarily different temperatures

The problem of radiant heat transfer between parallel disks has been analyzed by generalizing the standard gray-body enclosure theory. In particular, the assumption that the radiant flux leaving a surface and the local heat flux are uniformly distributed over the surface has been lifted by an integral equation formulation. It has been shown that the general problem of disks at arbitrarily different temperatures can be conveniently broken down into two subproblems, each of which can be solved independently of the temperature level. Numerical solutions of the governing integral equations have been carried out for spacing ratios h/R (h = spacing, R = disk radius) ranging from 5.0 to 0.05 and for emissivities ranging from 0.1 to 0.9. Local heat-transfer results have been presented which, depending on spacing and emissivity, display marked variations over the disk surface. Over-all heat-transfer results have been calculated and compared with the predictions of the standard simplified enclosure theory. These predictions of the simplified theory were found to be unexpectedly good, especially in view of the large surface variations of the local heat transfer.