Fluctuating surface-current formulation of radiative heat transfer for arbitrary geometries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a surface-current formulation for radiative heat transfer applicable to any geometry, leveraging boundary-element methods for efficient computation and enabling detailed spatial heat flux analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel fluctuating surface-current approach that extends existing models and integrates boundary-element techniques for versatile heat transfer calculations.

Findings

Validated method on spheres and cylinders

Extended analysis to complex geometries like interlocked rings

Enabled spatial heat flux distribution computation

Abstract

We describe a fluctuating surface-current formulation of radiative heat transfer, applicable to arbitrary geometries, that directly exploits standard, efficient, and sophisticated techniques from the boundary-element method. We validate as well as extend previous results for spheres and cylinders, and also compute the heat transfer in a more complicated geometry consisting of two interlocked rings. Finally, we demonstrate that the method can be readily adapted to compute the spatial distribution of heat flux on the surface of the interacting bodies.