Radiative heat transfer of spherical particles mediated by fluctuation electromagnetic field

TL;DR

This paper investigates radiative heat transfer between spherical particles in vacuum using fluctuation electromagnetic theory, revealing significantly higher conductance than previous models, especially for silica particles.

Contribution

It provides new calculations of radiative conductance between spherical particles, showing much higher values than earlier studies, using dipole and additive approximations.

Findings

Radiative conductance between silica particles is increased by 4 orders of magnitude.

The study extends the understanding of heat transfer in particle systems in vacuum.

Results are applicable to nanoscale thermal management and material design.

Abstract

We calculate intensity of radiative heat transfer and radiative conductance in a system of two spherical particles embedded in equilibrium vacuum background (photon gas). The temperatures of the particles and of the background radiation are arbitrary. The calculations are based on the dipole and additive approximations of the fluctuation electromagnetic theory. We obtained much higher radiative conductance between 25 mu silica particles (by 4 orders of magnitude) in comparison with recent results by A.Narayanaswamy and Gang Chen (Phys.Rev., 2008).