On the conduction/radiation heat transfer problem in a body with wavelength-dependent properties (Q1776696)

The subject of the work is the coupled conduction/radiation heat transfer process in an opaque body at rest with wavelength dependent properties. Inside the body there may be a heat flux and energy supply. Any opaque body surrounded by a nonopaque medium emits from its boundary thermal radiation. Since the normal component of the heat flux is continuous at the boundary, the heat conduction process inside the body is coupled with the heat exchange by thermal radiation from/to the body. This boundary condition introduces a nonlinearity. The considered heat transfer process is described by a partial differential equation subjected to a nonlinear boundary condition, which involves the classical Planck law. Since the Planck law makes sense only for non-negative values of the local absolute temperature this leads to a description with constraints. In order to reach a convenient unconstrained mathematical description a modified version of Planck's law is proposed. In the physically admissible range (non-negative absolute temperatures) this modified version of the Planck's law is equivalent to the classical one. A variational formulation of the heat transfer problem, defined above, is given. The solution of the partial differential equation together with the boundary condition minimizes a coercive functional. The existence of a solution is a consequence of the coercitivity, and the uniqueness follows from the convexity of the functional. As the first (analytical) example illustrating the results, the heat transfer in a rigid and opaque sphere surrounded by vacuum, that is heated by an internal heat supply and by an external black surface of prescribed temperature is considered. In the second example the Finite Element Method is applied to obtain the temperature field in a very long cuboid with different boundary conditions on the different surfaces. The temperature in each cell is determined such that the functional is minimized.