The radiative heat transfer inside a low-density carbon fiber insulator is analyzed using a three- dimensional direct simulation model. A robust procedure is presented for the numerical calculation of the geometric configuration factor to compute the radiative energy exchange processes among the small discretized surface areas of the fibrous material. The methodology is applied to a polygonal mesh of a fibrous insulator obtained from three-dimensional microscale imaging of the real material. The anisotro- pic values of the radiative conductivity are calculated for that geometry. The results yield both directional and thermal dependence of the radiative conductivity. The combined value of radiative and solid conduc- tivity are compared to experimental data available in the literature, and show excellent agreement.

Nouri, N., Panerai, F., Tagavi, K. A., Mansour, N. N., and Martin, A., “Evaluation of the anisotropic radiative conductivity of a low-density carbon fiber material from realistic microscale imaging,” Interna- tional Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Vol. 95, 2016, pp. 535–539.
DOI:10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2015.12.004