The design of radiant enclosures is an active area of research in radiation heat transfer. When design variables are discrete such as for radiant heater arrays with on-off control of individual heaters, current methods of design optimization fail. This paper reports the development of a metaheuristic thermal radiation optimization approach. Two metaheuristic optimization methods are explored: simulated annealing and tabu search. Both approaches are applied to a combinatorial radiant enclosure design problem. Configuration factors are used to develop a dynamic neighborhood for the tabu search algorithm. Results are presented from the combinatorial optimization problem. Tabu search with a problem specific dynamic neighborhood definition is shown to find better solutions than the benchmark simulated annealing approach in less computation time.
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