Unsteady heat conduction in stacked disks in a furnace has been numerically solved. The effects of relevant parameters such as, disk spacing, aspect ratio, environmental temperature, Biot number and etc. were investigated.
The nonuniformity of radiative heat flux over the top and bottom surface of a disk was found to be detrimental to uniform heating, especially when the thickness of the disk is small compared with the diameter. Axial conduction imposes some thermal resistance when the top and bottom surface-heating is significant and the aspect ratio is close to unity. Though the resulting dependence of temperature ninuniformity of various parameters is extremely complicated, high uniformity of temperature is available by low Biot number and/or low environmental temperature.
