Modeling Interfacial Thermal Boundary Conductance of Engineered Interfaces

Abstract : The hypothesis that motivates this grant--that material can be added at an interface to enhance its effective thermal conductance--was first explored using simulations. Our primary tool was the classical molecular dynamics (MD) method. The first part of the simulation work demonstrated that an interfacial film can enhance conductance in simple systems. The second part laid the groundwork to extend those simulations to more complex material systems. To theoretically investigate the phonon transport underlying the conductance trends observed in our simulations, we used various theoretical approaches to understand fundamental phonon transport in interfacial structures: (1) semi-empirical methods such as the DMM, (2) the wavelet transform applied to MD simulations, (3) Green's functions, and (4) the interfering particle model (IPM). Finally, the findings from simulations and theoretical analysis were used to design a series of experimental measurements of hBD at interfaces with varying thicknesses of interfacial films. The findings have been published in the 16 archival journal papers and 3 conference proceeding papers cited here, not including publications still under preparation. Each of these publications acknowledged funding from the AFOSR.