A modified inverse method for determining spectral radiative properties of participating medium from normal-hemispherical transmittance and reflectance

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a modified inverse method for retrieving the spectral absorption and transport scattering coefficients of participating medium, the method combines (i) several analytical expressions obtained from the modified two-flux (TF) approximation, (ii) the Monte Carlo (MC) method for predicting normal-hemispherical transmittance Tnh and reflectance Rnh generally obtained from experiments, as well as (iii) an optimization method employing the genetic algorithm (GA). Three types of typical participating medium, the green glass, the low-iron glass, and the silica aerogel with known radiative properties taken form the literatures, were used to illustrate the accuracy and robustness of the modified method by retrieving the input properties from the inverse identification in which the Tnh and Rnh ‘experimental data’ were obtained from the MC predictions. The results show that the modified inverse method was able to retrieve accurately the absorption and transport scattering coefficients of participating medium.