Essentials of Radiation Heat Transfer

This book is an attempt to present the essentials of radiation heat transfer to graduate students practicing engineers scientists technologists and the senior undergraduate students in a form and size palatable to them. The focus of the book is to cover only the absolute essentials required to gain an understanding of radiation heat transfer with which the reader can attempt to take on more challenging problems. The explanations are intentionally kept simple and lucid. The book follows an easy to read conversational style.All concepts are reinforced by carefully chosen and fully worked examples. Adequate number of exercise problems is provided at the end of every chapter.In a significant departure from other books on this subject this book completely dispenses with the network method to solve problems of radiation heat transfer in surfaces. The book instead presents the powerful radiosity-irradiation method and shows how this technique can be used to solve problems of radiation in enclosures made of one to any number of surfaces. The network method is not easily scalable. Secondly the book introduces atmospheric radiation which is now being considered as a potentially important area in which engineers can contribute to the technology of remote sensing and atmospheric sciences in general by a better understanding of radiation.Finally a new chapter on inverse problems in radiation is included expected to be of use to both engineers and atmospheric scientists.The book is an outgrowth of the course on radiation the author has been teaching at IIT Madras India for the last fifteen years. The book contains just the right material for a one semester course and is not an exhaustive treatise on radiation. The size of the book is consistent with the above objective and the need to retain reader interest in an age of decreasing attention spans and premium placed on brevity.