The Thermal Discrete Dipole Approximation (T-DDA) for near-field radiative heat transfer simulations in three-dimensional arbitrary geometries

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Thermal Discrete Dipole Approximation (T-DDA), a new numerical method for simulating near-field radiative heat transfer in complex 3D geometries, demonstrating high accuracy and convergence in various shapes and conditions.

Contribution

The T-DDA method is a novel approach that extends the Discrete Dipole Approximation to thermal radiation, enabling accurate simulations in arbitrary 3D geometries with good convergence properties.

Findings

T-DDA results agree well with analytical solutions for sphere conductance.

Resonant modes in silica spheres are accurately predicted by T-DDA.

Faster convergence observed for cubical geometries compared to curved ones.

Abstract

A novel numerical method called the Thermal Discrete Dipole Approximation (T-DDA) is proposed for modeling near-field radiative heat transfer in three-dimensional arbitrary geometries. The T-DDA is conceptually similar to the Discrete Dipole Approximation, except that the incident field originates from thermal oscillations of dipoles. The T-DDA is described in details in the paper, and the method is tested against exact results of radiative conductance between two spheres separated by a sub-wavelength vacuum gap. For all cases considered, the results calculated from the T-DDA are in good agreement with those from the analytical solution. When considering frequency-independent dielectric functions, it is observed that the number of sub-volumes required for convergence increases as the sphere permittivity increases. Additionally, simulations performed for two silica spheres of 0.5 micrometer-diameter show that the resonant modes are predicted accurately via the T-DDA. For separation gaps of 0.5 micrometer and 0.2 micrometer, the relative differences between the T-DDA and the exact results are 0.35% and 6.4%, respectively, when 552 sub-volumes are used to discretize a sphere. Finally, simulations are performed for two cubes of silica separated by a sub-wavelength gap. The results revealed that faster convergence is obtained when considering cubical objects rather than curved geometries. This work suggests that the T-DDA is a robust numerical approach that can be employed for solving a wide variety of near-field thermal radiation problems in three-dimensional geometries.