An improved method for computing radiant-interchange factors with corner-node modeling

Placing the thermal nodes at the corners of the radiation surfaces results in greater thermal-model accuracy for a given number of nodes, as compared to the more common practice of placing the thermal nodes at the center of the radiation surfaces. Placing the thermal nodes at the corners does, however, require greater computation time if the surfaces are subdivided such that they surround the corner nodes. In this paper the accuracy of subdividing is compared to the accuracy of allocating to the corner nodes the convective and radiative factors as computed by the center-node method. The comparison shows that, for a given number of nodes, the two methods have nearly the same accuracy, provided good modeling practice is followed in both bases.