Radiative Characteristics of High-Porosity Media Containing Randomly Oriented Fibers in Space

Abstract

This paper proposed radiative characteristics' expressions for media containing randomly oriented fibers in space. In deriving these simple radiative characteristics' expressions, the fibrous medium effective extinction coefficient is defined to match with the one of large particle obtained by combining geometric optics and Fraunhofer diffraction theory. Fibrous media radiative characteristics are then derived as an average over all incident radiation angles of single fiber radiative characteristics. Theoretical hemispherical reflectance and normal transmittance predictions using the proposed fibrous media radiative characteristics based on the Mie theory agreed well with literature experiments. Therefore, media containing fiber randomly oriented in space can be scaled to a suitable equivalent media such that scattering mechanisms behave similarly to that occurring in a participating media containing spherical particles. Numerical investigations show that a theoretical model which assumes Henyey–Greenstein (HG) scattering phase function can conveniently be used for the estimation of equivalent fibrous media radiative characteristics using hemispherical reflectance measurements. On the other hand, the estimated equivalent fibrous media radiative characteristics from hemispherical measurements and using a two-flux model with isotropic scaling radiative characteristics may be subjected to serious errors in the case of semitransparent media for which the absorption is significant.