Surface to Surface Radiation in Actively Cooled Vacuum Vessel

[alexander_fikri]

Hi ANSYS Forum

I am tryng to model heat transfer from laser converging and diffracting inside an actively cooled vacuum vessel. The simulation will roughly look like this:

I was originally planning on using Fluent with surface to surface radiation between the point heat source surface and the vacuum vessel wall before finding out that Fluent cannot model heat transfer in vacuum.

Can someone guide me on how I can best model this? Just applying surface heat flux wouldn't be accurate enough since the vacuum vessel geometry is pretty complex and I need to model how radiative heat being absorbed and reflected. So far I have the vacuum, the vessel and the cooling air domain CAD models.

 

[B D]

You can still use Fluent as far as the vacuum pressure is high enough to quality it as continuum. Beyond continuum hypothesis, conventional CFD models cannot be used.

[alexander_fikri]

That is one of the problem. The vessel will be vacuum as in very close to 0 Pa. I was hoping there is a way to just computate path of light ray until it hits the vessel wall without interacting with any of the mesh cell in the vacuum region

[jcooper]

You could further consider solving this as a coupled Fluent to Fluent problem with the vaccum domain solving only the radiation equation and the exterior cooling domain solving regular Navier Stokes flow equations.  A  Systems Coupling approach is probably best for this.

[alexander_fikri]

Could you please share more details on the Fluent to Fluent coupling method? A link to a tutorial video/page would also greatly appreciated