Effective phonon mean free path in polycrystalline nanostructures
Abstract
We have calculated the mean free path (MFP) of phonons associated with grain boundary scattering in polycrystalline nanostructures, by developing a Monte Carlo ray tracing transmission model that can be applied to arbitrary geometries. The calculations for various log-normal grain-size distributions realized by Voronoi diagrams and genetic algorithms show that the boundary-scattering MFP in a polycrystalline nanostructure is 20%–30% longer than that in a simple cubic structure with the same average grain size (defined by matching grain volumes). The impact on thermal conductivity is quantified for nanocrystalline silicon by using Matthiessen's rule to combine boundary scattering with intrinsic phonon-phonon scattering. The result reveals that the thermal conductivity depends strongly on the average grain size but only weakly on the breadth of the grain-size distribution, and thus, the simple cubic structure is a reasonable approximation for the polydisperse grain structure of actual materials.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Apr 27, 2015
- Source ID
- 10.1063/1.4918703
Entities
People
- Chris Dames
- Junichiro Shiomi
- Takuma Hori
Organizations
- Army Research Office
- Japan Science and Technology Agency
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of Tokyo