PDE Toolbox - Coupling boundaries via radiation

I want to solve the heat conduction problem on several bodies, which are coupled by exchanging heat across their boundaries via (diffuse) radiation.

For this, I need to specify heat fluxes at the boundaries that dependent also on boundary temperatures on other boundaries - they are thus non-local.

However, when defining custom functions for, e.g., the heat flux boundary condition, I only have access to points and temperatures on this very boundary.

So, basically, Is there a way to couple boundaries?

[Ravi Kumar]

Hi Michael,

You need surface-to-surface/enclosure radiation capability to model such coupling. Would you be able to reach out to me via email and share a bit of details on the use case.

Regards,

Ravi

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

Do I understand you right that you want to solve for the temperature as a function of time and position within each body? That is there will be some variation of temperatures over each surface at each time-step.

[Jiri Hajek]

Hi @Michael Baumgart, you mention that your radiative heat transfer is diffuse. Do you mean that the medium where you want to simulate radiative heat transfer is optically thick? This would be possible to model using the so-called Roseland model, which is a diffusion approximation. In such a case you could put the domain of radiative heat transfer medium into your PDE model and avoid modelling using a ray tracing algorithm or S2S model.