We are looking for a new enthusiastic member to our team to develop the computational methods for thermal radiation in fires.
It was year 2000 when I was sent from VTT to work as a guest researcher at NIST/BFRL. Within the next year (2000-2001) we wrote, with Dr. Kevin McGrattan, a Finite Volume Method (FVM) -based solver for the thermal radiation to the Fire Dynamics Simulator. FVM is quite similar to the more commonly used Discrete Ordinates Method (DOM). That piece of code has served the fire safety engineers and researchers pretty well over the fiveteen years. Of course, a number of people have contributed to that code since that, but the main body code and the model formulation are still the same.
Limitations and problems have been observed over the years. For instance, the ray effect is a problem for the long-distance calculation as it makes the radiative heat fluxes very non-uniform due to the numerical issues. And so is the relatively clumsy spectral modelling option, which enforces most of us to do gray gas calculations even in the cases where the spectral band -nature of the gas emission and absorption makes a difference. And the recent experiences indicate that the accurate calculation of radiation penetration into the liquid pool requires spectral resolution.
So, there is work to do. See the announcement at http://www.aalto.fi/en/about/careers/jobs/view/899/.
