The best nanoparticle size distribution for minimum thermal conductivity
- Creators
- Zhang, Hang
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Minnich, Austin J.
Abstract
Which sizes of nanoparticles embedded in a crystalline solid yield the lowest thermal conductivity? Nanoparticles have long been demonstrated to reduce the thermal conductivity of crystals by scattering phonons, but most previous works assumed the nanoparticles to have a single size. Here, we use optimization methods to show that the best nanoparticle size distribution to scatter the broad thermal phonon spectrum is not a similarly broad distribution but rather several discrete peaks at well-chosen nanoparticle radii. For SiGe, the best size distribution yields a thermal conductivity below that of amorphous silicon. Further, we demonstrate that a simplified distribution yields nearly the same low thermal conductivity and can be readily fabricated. Our work provides important insights into how to manipulate the full spectrum of phonons and will guide the design of more efficient thermoelectric materials.
Additional Information
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder in order to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 29 October 2014; Accepted 13 February 2015; Published 11 March 2015. This work was supported by a start-up fund from the California Institute of Technology and by the National Science Foundation under CAREER Grant CBET 1254213. Author contributions: A.M. conceived this project. H.Z. designed the algorithm and performed calculations. H.Z. and A.M. analyzed the data. H.Z. and A.M. discussed the result. H.Z. and A.M. wrote the manuscript.Attached Files
Published - srep08995.pdf
Submitted - 1404.1438v1.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC4355732
- Eprint ID
- 45134
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20140423-092709245
- Caltech
- NSF
- CBET-1254213
- Created
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2014-04-23Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field