Thermal conductivity modeling of compacted type nanocomposites

Abstract

Due to different interface densities and arrangements, the compacted type nanocomposites may yield even lower thermal conductivity than embedded type nanocomposites. In this paper, the phonon transport and thermal conductivity in compacted type nanocomposites (nanowires and nanoparticles) are investigated using a deterministic phonon Boltzmann transport equation solver. The effects of interface density and characteristic size on the phonon energy transport in nanocomposites are studied. It is found that the silicon-germanium compacted nanoparticle composites can have lower value of thermal conductivity than that of compacted nanowire composites under the same characteristic size (21.6% lower when the characteristic size is 3 nm).