Effects of Surface Emissivity and Medium Scattering Albedo on the Computational Accuracy of Radiative Heat Transfer by MCM

ABSTRACT A method for directly and quantitatively evaluating the computational accuracy of the Monte Carlo method (MCM) simulation of radiative transfer has been proposed in previous research. In this note, the effects of surface emissivity and scattering albedo on the computational accuracy of MCM are evaluated in this study. The results indicate that scattering albedo exerts no significant effect on the accuracy of MCM. When the mean optical thickness per element (MOTE) is less than 0.1, an increase in surface emissivity from 0.1 to 0.9 leads to an increase in minimum calculation error by about 3 to 4 times, which is not closely associated with the change in MOTE. If the desired accuracy is set at 1.0% with an acceptable cost, as surface emissivity increases from 0.001 to 0.9999, the minimum number of energy bundles (NEB) required for surface elements increases from 6 to 6000, and the corresponding maximum MOTE increases from 0.0002 to 0.26. For space elements with an increase in surface emissivity from 0.001 to 0.9999, the minimum NEB for the desired accuracy of 1.0% increases from 2 to 1980. For the desired accuracy, the maximum MOTE for different surface emissivity increases linearly with an increase in NEB.