RadCAD: Validation of a New Thermal Radiation Analyzer

RadCAD^™* is a thermal radiation tool used to calculate form factors, exchange factors, and absorbed fluxes via Monte Carlo technique. Panczak in reference 1 presented a complete overview of RadCAD including: motivation, approach and algorithms. This paper presents verification problems that were used to validate RadCAD form factor calculations. Calculated form factors are compared to exact solutions for 5 different geometric configurations. For each geometric configuration, dimensions were modified resulting in a total of 36 cases. Cases were selected to fully exercise RacCAD's solution algorithms. Using the ray tracing technique, the number of rays shot for each case was varied from 500 to 100,000.

From results presented here, RadCAD's form factor calculation provides results consistent with the assumptions that govern a Monte Carlo analysis. Results show that RadCAD converges to the exact solution in a manner consistent with Monte Carlo Techniques.