MARVEL seminar: "Thermal phonon transport for energy applications" (Zhiting Tian)

Practical details:

• In-person participation: room MED 2 1124 (Coviz2), EPFL
• Remote participation: Zoom link
  

Thermal Phonon Transport for Energy Applications

The ever-increasing energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions call for a clean energy economy. With my group’s expertise in thermal transport and energy conversion, our efforts to contribute to a sustainable energy future come twofold: 1) Improve renewable energy harvesting technologies from thermal energy, such as thermoelectrics; 2) Guide the thermally aware design of microelectronics to save energy on cooling and enable the high-frequency, high power operations to support a more capable, resilient, and reliable future grid. Thermal phonons (THz lattice vibrations) are the major heat carriers in insulators and semiconductors. A solid grasp of thermal phonon transport is essential to designing materials and devices for thermal energy conversion and management. In this talk, I will share my group’s work on thermal phonon transport using atomistic modeling and optical measurements. More specifically, I will share our inelastic x-ray scattering measurements to probe phonon dynamics of ultrahigh and ultralow thermal conductivity materials, our development of anharmonic atomistic Green’s function method that overcame a decade-long challenge for interfacial thermal modeling, our discovery of thermal diode behaviors in asymmetric polymer macromolecules using molecular dynamics simulations, and our very recent work on capturing the higher-order phonon dynamics and quantum tunneling in a high-temperature phase material using machine-learned temperature-dependent potentials.

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. Her 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, National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35 China, 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, and ACS Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering (PMSE) Young Investigator Award. Zhiting serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Physics.