On the Selection of Integration Intervals for the Calculation of Mean Absorption Coefficients

In radiation modeling of thermal plasmas non-grey models are applied where the radiative transport is described in several frequency bands (spectral intervals). Hereby mean absorption coefficients have to be calculated by a spectral integration procedure, providing a constant mean absorption coefficient for each band. Depending on the number of bands, one or more integration boundaries have to be selected in order to do the integration. In this paper we evaluate the influence of the selection of these integration boundaries on the mean absorption coefficient and the also radiation transfer by applying the mean absorption coefficients in a radiation transport model. Using a simplified two-band model we demonstrate that the selection of the integration boundary has a large impact on the total model accuracy. We show that in some cases selecting a band boundary right at the frequency where the continuum absorption shows a jump can introduce a significant error into the radiation calculation. The process of the integration interval selection thus demands a global optimization procedure to properly evaluate the boundaries of each frequency band.