Radiative heat transfer in a completely general plane-parallel environment

A new approach to radiative heat transfer with scattering is presented and used to obtain the first general solution for radiative equilibrium in a non-grey, plane-parallel medium. Use of the method when including conduction and convection is also discussed. Diffuse radiative fields are calculated in terms of defined scattering functions (Green's functions) that represent the response of the medium and any scattering (reflecting) surfaces to unitary-type illumination. These scattering functions are found using the computationally fast adding/doubling method. The energy conservation equation containing these scattering functions is then solved numerically for any particular heat transfer problem.