THERMAL PROPERTIES OF MATERIALS, FROM MACROSCALE TO NANOSCALE

Specific Foundation / Core

The course is also offered to exchange programme students.

Upon completion of the course students will be able to design atomistic models and perform Molecular Dynamics simulations by means of LAMMPS to solve and analyse thermal properties of materials

This postgraduate course covers the most important thermal transport fundamentals. The course aims first to give an introduction of the thermal properties and theories at the macroscale and the variations/differentiantions measured or predicted by atomistic simulations at the nanoscale and secondly to introduce a unified framework for understanding essential physics of nanoscale thermal transport. The study of the thermodynamic potentials’ variation such as Gibbs free energy, entropy and enthalpy versus the temperature and concentration of the participant elements in order to investigate the stable miscibility conditions. As the course is for both physicists and engineers the importance of the heat transport at various applications as well the research trends will be explored, giving some experimental, practical and technological considerations and fundamental limits. The first objective for this course is to provide students with a knowledge and understanding of the fundamental elements of solid state physics relevant to heat transport. The four types of heat energy transport by conduction, convection, radiation, or during phase change will be presented making the relation of the typical heat carriers as electrons, photons, phonons, atoms, or molecules with the transport properties. The microscopic description of heat transport is necessary to understand the interaction of the energy carriers with point or extended defects and free surfaces or interfaces which become predominant at nanostructures and nanostructured materials. After the introductory part, the course will be focused mainly on phonons (lattice vibrations), their characteristics and statistics (Phonon Density of States, Phonon dispersion curves, etc), their formalisms, their connection with basic thermal properties and their scattering processes. The second objective of the course will be the introduction on the experimental methods of assessing temperature dependence and behavior of materials. The study of the measured thermal properties of the nanostructures, the physical parameters affecting the phase transformations, as well as the methods used for the analysis and interpretation of the results. The third objective is to provide students with the understanding of the basics of simulations approaches in atomistic or in continuum principles and to develop modeling and simulation skills to calculate thermal properties of nanostructures or nanostructured materials applying Molecular Dynamics methods. A hands-on on LAMMPS will be given and a concrete example will be studied. The course is accessible to those with background in physics or engineering. No familiarity with heat transfer and thermal physics will be assumed.

05-05-2021