Tuomas Puurtinen

Engineering thermal conductance using a two-dimensional phononic crystal

Controlling thermal transport has become relevant in recent years. Traditionally, this control has been achieved by tuning the scattering of phonons by including various types of scattering centres in the material (nanoparticles, impurities, etc). Here we take another approach and demonstrate that one can also use coherent band structure effects to control phonon thermal conductance, with the help of periodically nanostructured phononic crystals. We perform the experiments at low temperatures below 1 K, which not only leads to negligible bulk phonon scattering, but also increases the wavelength of the dominant thermal phonons by more than two orders of magnitude compared to room temperature. Thus, phononic crystals with lattice constants ≥1 μm are shown to strongly reduce the thermal conduction. The observed effect is in quantitative agreement with the theoretical calculation presented, which accurately determined the ballistic thermal conductance in a phononic crystal device.

A prospect for computing in porous materials research: Very large fluid flow simulations

Abstract Properties of porous materials, abundant both in nature and industry, have broad influences on societies via, e.g. oil recovery, erosion, and propagation of pollutants. The internal structure of many porous materials involves multiple scales which hinders research on the relation between structure and transport properties: typically laboratory experiments cannot distinguish contributions from individual scales while computer simulations cannot capture multiple scales due to limited capabilities. Thus the question arises how large domain sizes can in fact be simulated with modern computers. This question is here addressed using a realistic test case; it is demonstrated that current computing capabilities allow the direct pore-scale simulation of fluid flow in porous materials using system sizes far beyond what has been previously reported. The achieved system sizes allow the closing of some particular scale gaps in, e.g. soil and petroleum rock research. Specifically, a full steady-state fluid flow simulation in a porous material, represented with an unprecedented resolution for the given sample size, is reported: the simulation is executed on a CPU-based supercomputer and the 3D geometry involves 16,384 3 lattice cells (around 590 billion of them are pore sites). Using half of this sample in a benchmark simulation on a GPU-based system, a sustained computational performance of 1.77 PFLOPS is observed. These advances expose new opportunities in porous materials research. The implementation techniques here utilized are standard except for the tailored high-performance data layouts as well as the indirect addressing scheme with a low memory overhead and the truly asynchronous data communication scheme in the case of CPU and GPU code versions, respectively.

Radial phononic thermal conductance in thin membranes in the Casimir limit: Design guidelines for devices

In a previous publication [I. J. Maasilta, AIP Advances 1, 041704 (2011)], we discussed the formalism and some computational results for phononic thermal conduction in the suspended membrane geometry for radial heat flow from a central source, which is a common geometry for some low-temperature detectors, for example. We studied the case where only diffusive surface scattering is present, the so called Casimir limit, which can be experimentally relevant at temperatures below ∼ 10 K in typical materials, and even higher for ultrathin samples. Here, we extend our studies to much thinner membranes, obtaining numerical results for geometries which are more typical in experiments. In addition, we interpret the results in terms of the small signal and differential thermal conductance, so that guidelines for designing devices, such as low-temperature bolometric detectors, are more easily obtained. Scaling with membrane dimensions is shown to differ significantly from the bulk scattering, and, in particular, thin...

Simulation software for flow of fluid with suspended point particles in complex domains: application to matrix diffusion

Matrix diffusion is a phenomenon in which tracer particles convected along a flow channel can diffuse into porous walls of the channel, and it causes a delay and broadening of the breakthrough curve of a tracer pulse. Analytical and numerical methods exist for modeling matrix diffusion, but there are still some features of this phenomenon, which are difficult to address using traditional approaches. To this end we propose to use the lattice-Boltzmann method with point-like tracer particles. These particles move in a continuous space, are advected by the flow, and there is a stochastic force causing them to diffuse. This approach can be extended to include particle-particle and particle-wall interactions of the tracer. Numerical results that can also be considered as validation of the LBM approach, are reported. As the reference we use recently-derived analytical solutions for the breakthrough curve of the tracer.

Low temperature heat capacity of phononic crystal membranes

Phononic crystal (PnC) membranes are a promising solution to improve sensitivity of bolometric sensor devices operating at low temperatures. Previous work has concentrated only on tuning thermal conductance, but significant changes to the heat capacity are also expected due to the modification of the phonon modes. Here, we calculate the area-specific heat capacity for thin (37.5 - 300 nm) silicon and silicon nitride PnC membranes with cylindrical hole patterns of varying period, in the temperature range 1 - 350 mK. We compare the results to two- and three-dimensional Debye models, as the 3D Debye model is known to give an accurate estimate for the low-temperature heat capacity of a bulk sample. We found that thin PnC membranes do not obey the 3D Debye T3 law, nor the 2D T2 law, but have a weaker, approximately linear temperature dependence in the low temperature limit. We also found that depending on the design, the PnC patterning can either enhance or reduce the heat capacity compared to an unpatterned m...

On calculating the radiated ballistic phonon power in phononic crystal membranes

Phononic crystals are periodically modified structures, where the phonon spectra (dispersion relations) are strongly modified due to interference, or Bragg reflections. In all practical cases, the resulting dispersion relations have to be calculated numerically, using for example the finite difference or the finite element method. We show that if one uses the results of finite element modeling directly in the calculation of phonon group velocities, a sizeable numerical error in the calculation of thermal conductance or radiated power can easily follow. We introduce here a sorting algorithm for the eigenfrequency surfaces to reduce this error, which arises from the discretization of the k-space points.

Coupling of lattice-Boltzmann solvers with suspended particles using the MPI intercommunication framework

Abstract The MPI intercommunication framework was used for coupling of two lattice-Boltzmann solvers with suspended particles, which model advection and diffusion respectively of these particles in a carrier fluid. Simulation domain was divided into two parts, one with advection and diffusion, and the other with diffusion only (no macroscopic flow). Particles were exchanged between these domains at their common boundary by a direct process to process communication. By analysing weak and strong scaling, it was shown that the linear scaling characteristics of the lattice-Boltzmann solvers were not compromised by their coupling.

LBM simulations of matrix diffusion with sorption

Matrix diffusion is a phenomenon in which tracer particles convected along a flow channel can diffuse into porous walls of the channel, and it causes a delay and broadening of the breakthrough curve of the tracer pulse. The lattice-Boltzmann method is a popular tool for simulating flow through porous materials, and for similar reasons it is an attractive tool for modeling the matrix diffusion phenomenon. In this work sorption of the tracer particles is also included in such simulations with this method. The proposed approach is compared with conventional methods for modeling matrix diffusion phenomena.