Abstract
Understanding nanoscale thermal transport processes is essential to designing nano-materials and devices with desired thermal transport properties for thermal energy conversion and management. Despite the significant progress in thermal transport of simple inorganic crystals, thermal transport in complex structures and across interfaces remains largely unexplored. In this talk, I will present my research group’s efforts to understand thermal transport in complex structures and across interfaces, using atomic modeling and experimental characterization. For complex structures, I will cover phonon dynamics in 3D and 2D hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites using inelastic x-ray scattering, where we gained useful insights into their ultralow thermal conductivity and remarkably weak anisotropy in 2D hybrid. I will share our first-principles study on boron suboxides, which have unusually high thermal conductivity despite their complex structures. I will also show the great potential of covalent organic framework to reach all-directional high thermal conductivity using molecular dynamics simulations. On the interface side, I will highlight our development of rigorous formalism for anharmonic atomistic Green’s function to capture the contribution of inelastic scattering at the interfaces and direct observation of phonon Anderson localization in aperiodic superlattices.
About the Speaker
Dr. Zhiting Tian is an associate professor, Eugene A. Leinroth Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow of the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Zhiting obtained her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 2014. Zhiting’s awards and honors include ASME Fellow, NASA Early Stage Innovations Award, Air Force of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award, Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award, 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, and ACS Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering (PMSE) Young Investigator Award. Zhiting also serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Physics.
Host: Professor Nenad Miljkovic
