Characteristic length of phonon transport within periodic nanoporous thin films and two-dimensional materials

Abstract

In the past two decades, phonon transport within nanoporous thin films has attracted enormous attention for their potential applications in thermoelectrics and thermal insulation. Various computational studies have been carried out to explain the thermal conductivity reduction within these thin films. Considering classical phonon size effects, the lattice thermal conductivity can be predicted assuming diffusive pore-edge scattering of phonons and bulk phonon mean free paths. Following this, detailed phonon transport can be simulated for a given porous structure to find the lattice thermal conductivity [Hao et al., J. Appl. Phys. 106, 114321 (2009)]. However, such simulations are intrinsically complicated and cannot be used for the data analysis of general samples. In this work, the characteristic length ΛPore of periodic nanoporous thin films is extracted by comparing the predictions of phonon Monte Carlo simulations and the kinetic relationship using bulk phonon mean free paths modified by ΛPore. Under strong ballistic phonon transport, ΛPore is also extracted by the Monte Carlo ray-tracing method for graphene with periodic nanopores. The presented model can be widely used to analyze the measured thermal conductivities of such nanoporous structures.