INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS IN HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER, vol.24, no.3, pp.349-356, 1997 (Journal Indexed in SCI)
Radiative equilibrium problem for an absorbing emitting medium between plane parallel diffuse surfaces can be expressed by the Fredholm equation of the second kind. In this paper a variational formulation of the problem is obtained in terms of a functional. Dimensionless temperatures and heat fluxes for various optical thicknesses are then solved by the Ritz method. Results are expressed in terms of a third order polynomial with two coefficients and are very close to the exact solution of Heaslet and Warming. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.