I am currently working on a radiative heat transfer problem, and at the moment I am only interested in calculating the view factor. I have never used Fluent to calculate the view factor, and it seems to give me trouble for something that seems very straight forward.

When defining the radiative model to surface-to-surface, the program responds when selecting compute/write with:

"Error reading...[name of file]"

and the command window says:

"You must read in a view factors file or disable S2S model before proceeding. Error: Failed while reading view factor file.

Error Object: ()"

The view factor file should be written by doing this, but the program will not write the file because it seems to have trouble reading it.

Thanks.

Hello,

The way to compute and write the viewfactors is the same as you have mentioned. So, in principle, this should work. However, in case it is not working this way, you have one more way of calculating the viewfactors. For this purpose, you have to write a cluster file in FLUENT session (File->Write->Surface Clusters)and then use this cluster file outside the FLUENT session as an input to the 'viewfac' utility.

Example:

On any Unix/Linux based system:

Fluent.Inc/bin/utility viewfac your_cluster_filename

On Windows:

Fluent.Inc/ntbin/ntx86/utility viewfac your_cluster_filename

After calculating the viewfactors, you have to read the file in FLUENT session to proceed with calculations.