Nanoscale heat conduction with applications in nanoelectronics and thermoelectrics

When the device or structure characteristic length scales are comparable to the mean free path and wavelength of energy carriers (electrons, photons, phonons, and molecules) or the time of interest is on the same order as the carrier relaxation time, conventional heat transfer theory is no longer valid. Tremendous progress has been made in the past two decades to understand and characterize heat transfer in nanostructures. However most work in the last decade has focused on heat transfer in simple nanostructures, such as thin films, superlattices and nanowires. In reality, there is a demand to study transport process in complex nanostructures for engineering applications, such as heat transfer in nanoelectronic devices and the thermal conductivity in nanocomposites which consists of nanowires or nanoparticles embedded in a matrix material. Another class of problems which are rich in physics and might be explored for better design of both nanoelectronic devices and energy conversion materials and devices are coupled electron and phonon transport. Experimentally, most past work has been focused on thermal conductivity characterization of various nanostructures and very little has been done on the fundamental transport properties of energy carriers.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Yang, Ronggui, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gang Chen.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35620

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35620