Thermal radiation plays an important role in heat transfer in combustion furnaces. The weighted-sum-of gray -gases model (WSGGM), representing a good compromise between computational efficiency and accuracy, is commonly used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of combustion processes for evaluating gaseous radiative properties. However, the WSGGMs still have some limitations in practical use, e.g., unable to naturally accommodate different combustion environments, difficult to accurately address the variations in species concentrations in a flame, and inconvenient to account for the impacts of participating species other than H2O and CO2. As a result, WSGGMs with different coefficients have been published for specific applications. In this paper, a reliable generic model for gaseous radiation property calculation, which is a computationally efficient exponential wide band model (E-EWBM) applicable to combustion CFD and able to naturally solve all the practical limitations of the WSGGMs, is presented, programmed and verified. The model is then implemented to CFD simulation of a 300 kW air-fuel and a 0.8 MW oxy-fuel combustion furnace, respectively, to demonstrate its computational applicability to general combustion CFD and its capability in producing reliable CFD results for different combustion environments. It is found that the usefulness of the WSGGMs in oxy-fuel combustion CFD is compromised if the important impacts of high levels of CO under oxy-fuel combustion cannot be accounted for. The E-EWBM that appropriately takes the impacts of H2O, CO2, CO and CH4 into account is a good replacement of the oxy-fuel WSGGMs for oxy-fuel combustion CFD. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.