absorption cross-section, pressure, temperature, molar fraction, line-byline calculations.
Accurate computations of radiative heat transfer in participating gases require detailed knowledge of the spectral data of radiative properties. This can be achieved either performing line-by-line calculations or using an accurate spectral model. In both cases, the absorption cross-section is computed from high resolution databases, which use to contain parameters for millions of spectral lines. The absorption cross-section depends on the local thermodynamic gas state, being a function of temperature, pressure and chemical species concentration, which vary with location in non-uniform gases. Therefore, the absorption cross-section must be computed and stored for diverse gas states, requiring considerable computational resources. In addition, the dependence of the absorptions cross-section with local gas properties poses complexity in radiation problems involving participating gases. This work proposes and evaluates an approximation in which the absorption crosssection is obtained by taking one or more thermodynamic properties as constant. Results of radiative transfer based on this approximation are obtained and analyzed. The local properties are temperature, molar fraction of each chemical species and pressure. The approximation reduces problems complexity and the size of the absorption cross-section database. It was evaluated for gases composed by CO2 and air, H2O and air, and mixtures of CO2, H2O and air. Uniform and nonuniform media were considered. Molar fractions of CO2 and H2O from 5 % to 100 % were considered, while temperatures varied from 500 K to 2500 K. Pressure was always 1 atm, except for those related to the approximation, where the pressure was given by a non-uniform profile. Results demonstrated that the approximation in which the absorption cross-section is obtained for a fixed molar fraction can be highly accurate when applied to non-isothermal and non-uniform gases.