Efficient inverse radiation analysis of temperature distribution in participating medium based on backward Monte Carlo method

An efficient numerical inverse radiation analysis based on the backward Monte Carlo (BMC) method is presented to determine the three-dimensional (3-D) temperature distribution in a large rectangular enclosure containing the participating medium, using radiative intensities in the visible range received by charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras. For large radiative sources and small detectors, when the radiation onto a small spot and onto a small direction cone is desired, the BMC method is more efficient than the forward Monte Carlo (FMC) method. Because the temperature reconstruction from the measured radiative intensities is an ill-posed inverse problem, least-square QR decomposition (LSQR) method is introduced to determine the meaningful temperature distribution. In order to gain insight into the effects on the accuracy of temperature distribution reconstruction, the detailed analyses are made using numerical simulations. The results show that the temperature distribution can be reconstructed accurately for the exact and noisy data. (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.