In this paper we examine the use of low-rank approximations for the handling of radiation boundary conditions in a transient heat equation given a cavity radiation setting. The finite element discretization that arises from cavity radiation is well known to be dense, which poses difficulties for efficiency and scalability of solvers. Here we consider a special treatment of the cavity radiation discretization using a block low-rank approximation combined with hierarchical matrices. We provide an overview of the methodology and discusses techniques that can be used to improve efficiency within the framework of hierarchical matrices, including the usage of the approximate cross approximation (ACA) method. We provide a number of numerical results that demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the approach in practical problems, and demonstrate significant speedup and memory reduction compared to the more conventional "dense matrix" approach.

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