This combo-box offers a choice between calculation of the View factor and the possibility to read them on a file (from a previous calculation).

The view factor file is a binary file which contain all the necessary information for the radiosity approach. Calculating the view factor may take quite a long time due to the integral nature of radiation. Indeed, each view factor corresponds to a quadruple integral, and if N is the number of independent radiation patches, the number of view factors to estimate can go up to N*(N-1)/2, ie of the order of the square of independent patches. In SYRTHES, for reasons related to parallelism, we do calculate the complete N*N matrix and store the non zero entries.

To save the initialization step, a possibility of reading previously calculated view factor is given, provided that the geometry has not changed between the two calculations.

Message from IR : For the time being, in some cases problems occur during the reading of the file in parallel. Work will be done in the future to make this step more robust. In case of problems, choose the calculation option.

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SYRTHES version : VERSION_SYRTHES
Name help file : Vfm_2D_cmb.html
I. Rupp, C. Peniguel - may 2014
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