MAE Department - PG Seminar - Understanding the micro-nanoscale thermal transport mechanisms with the efficient solution of nongray phonon Boltzmann transport equation
The advancements in nanotechnology have led to a significant demand for investigating thermal transport at the submicron scale. At this scale, the conventional heat diffusion equation based on Fourier's law is no longer applicable. This presentation introduces the GiftBTE, an open-source general-purpose software package for solving the non-gray phonon Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) developed by our group. GiftBTE exhibits excellent computational efficiency, enabling realistic three-dimensional simulations of devices and material structures. By interfacing with first-principles calculations, this package allows for parameter-free and accurate computation of submicron thermal transport for arbitrary structures. The applications of GiftBTE include, but are not limited to, computing the effective thermal conductivity of various nanostructures, predicting temperature and heat flux in nanodevices, and simulating laser heating on materials involving small hotspots or ultra-fast processes. This presentation also introduces a few studies based on our efficient BTE solver, including the phonon transport mechanism in molecular dynamics simulations, quantifying the diverse wave effect of thermal transport in porous graphene, thermal transport process adjacent to a nanoscale hotspot, and the self-heating in fin field-effect transistor.
Prof. Hua Bao is a professor at Global Institute of Future Technology in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received his B.S. in Department of Physics at Tsinghua University, China, in 2006, and obtained his Ph.D. from School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University in 2012, under the supervision of Prof. Xiulin Ruan. He joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University (University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute) in 2012 as an assistant professor. His research interests include micro and nanoscale thermal conduction and radiation transport, and the applications in electronics thermal management and reliability, solar energy utilization, and radiative cooling. His research has been funded by many sponsors, including the excellent young scholar funding from National Science Foundation of China.