Thermal management beyond Fourier using nanomaterials
Résumé
The thermal transfer at the small scales differs significantly compare to the bulk materials.
This enables the creation and conceptualization of nanocomposite or nanostructured materials
for specific thermal management purposes. Due to nanostructuration, interesting non Fourier
phenomena have been explored recently such as thermal rectification [1], phonon filtering [2],
diffraction/interference of phonons [3]. These different phenomena opens the way for new
applications, for instance, thermal rectification enables the creation of smart material that can
dissipate heat or insulate depending on the ambient conditions, diffraction of phonons allows
focussing heat on a specific spot to heat it or on the contrary shield it from heat. Phonon
filtering on the other end may be useful in the field of phononic computing in which
information is process using phonons, in these condition it might be useful to select a
frequency carrying information. In this work, we show that these different properties can be
achieved using amorphous crystalline nanocomposites without requiring the use of complex
crystalline structures. For this, we perform molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of different
silicon nanostructures.
The MD simulations have been performed using LAMMPS. To assess the different properties
of the material we have used non-equilibrium molecular dynamics [4], in which the thermal
conductivity is obtained using the energy exchanged between two thermostats establishing a
thermal gradient. We have also used wave packet propagation simulations, in which a wave-
packet representing a phonon is created in the material by exciting a group of atoms with a
Gaussian windowed sinusoidal at a given frequency and polarization. The attenuation of the
amplitude of the wave-packet as a function of the distance allows the computation of the
mean free path of phonons at low temperature [4].