Theoretical Thermal Conductivity of Porous Silicon: Nonlinear Behavior

Abstract

AbstractThe use of porous silicon (PS) in fabricating optoelectronic devices is in progress. However, the performance of such applications still needs to be improved. In particular, in solar cells heat must be dissipated to avoid a decay in their efficiency and one of the properties of PS that must be evaluated is the effective thermal conductivity. It is well known that the thermal conductivity of silicon is temperature dependent. Thus we cannot use a standard effective medium approach to obtain its effective thermal response. In this work, we extend the averaging volume and surface methods [1] to consider nonlinear effects in the effective transport coefficients. We model PS as composed of c-Si cylindrical columns covered by different overlayers (i.e. a-Si or SiO2) immersed in another medium. In our model the effective thermal conductivity has an explicit dependence on the temperature gradient. We present a parametric analysis of the model, compare it with the c-Si behavior and evaluate the importance of the nonlinear contribution.