Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) optimization of microfluidic mixing in a MEMS steam generator

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 23-24).The challenge of achieving rapid mixing in microchannels is addressed through a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study using the ADINA-F finite element program. The study is motivated by the need to design an adequate mixing chamber for aqueous chemical reactants in a micro steam generator. The study focuses on the geometric optimization of a static micromixer channel by considering the trade-off between mixing quality and pressure drop. Both zigzag and straight channels are evaluated, in addition to channels with differing amounts of added obstruction features. Due to computational limits, the numerical analysis is conducted in two dimensions. The results indicate that hydrodynamic focusing of the reactant at the inlet, in addition to the amount and density of added obstruction features, has the most significant impact on mixing efficiency and increased pressure drop. The study presents mixing quality and pressure drop trends that provide useful information for the micro steam generator mixing chamber design.by Kimberlee C. Collons.S.B

Experimental investigations of solid-solid thermal interface conductance

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-84).Understanding thermal interface conductance is important for nanoscale systems where interfaces can play a critical role in heat transport. In this thesis, pump and probe transient thermoreflectance methods are used to measure the thermal interface conductance between solid materials. Two experimental studies of thermal interface conductance are presented, each revealing the complexity of phonon interactions at interfaces which are inadequately captured by current models of phonon transmissivity. The first study considers interfaces of different metals with graphite, and finds that atomic-scale roughness at the interface could be appreciably influencing the heat transport due to the extreme anisotropy of graphite. The thermal interface conductance of graphite is found to be similar to that of diamond, suggesting that when estimating the thermal interface conductance between metal and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), a reasonable assumption may be that the conductance with the side walls of the MWCNTs is similar to the conductance with the ends of the MWCNTs. The second study considered aluminum on diamond interfaces where the diamond samples were functionalized to have different chemical surface terminations. The surface termination of the diamond is found to significantly influence the heat flow, with oxygenated diamond, which is hydrophilic, exhibiting four times higher thermal interface conductance than hydrogen-treated diamond, which is hydrophobic. Microstructure analysis determined that the Al film formed similarly, independent of diamond surface termination, suggesting that differences in interface bonding likely caused the observed difference in thermal interface conductance, a phenomenon which is not captured in current models of solid-solid phonon transmissivity.by Kimberlee Chiyoko Collins.S.M

The multiple fates of sinking particles in the North Atlantic Ocean

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2015. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles 29 (2015): 1471–1494, doi:10.1002/2014GB005037.The direct respiration of sinking organic matter by attached bacteria is often invoked as the dominant sink for settling particles in the mesopelagic ocean. However, other processes, such as enzymatic solubilization and mechanical disaggregation, also contribute to particle flux attenuation by transferring organic matter to the water column. Here we use observations from the North Atlantic Ocean, coupled to sensitivity analyses of a simple model, to assess the relative importance of particle-attached microbial respiration compared to the other processes that can degrade sinking particles. The observed carbon fluxes, bacterial production rates, and respiration by water column and particle-attached microbial communities each spanned more than an order of magnitude. Rates of substrate-specific respiration on sinking particle material ranged from 0.007 ± 0.003 to 0.173 ± 0.105 day−1. A comparison of these substrate-specific respiration rates with model results suggested sinking particle material was transferred to the water column by various biological and mechanical processes nearly 3.5 times as fast as it was directly respired. This finding, coupled with strong metabolic demand imposed by measurements of water column respiration (729.3 ± 266.0 mg C m−2 d−1, on average, over the 50 to 150 m depth interval), suggested a large fraction of the organic matter evolved from sinking particles ultimately met its fate through subsequent remineralization in the water column. At three sites, we also measured very low bacterial growth efficiencies and large discrepancies between depth-integrated mesopelagic respiration and carbon inputs.U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) STAR Grant Number: FP-91744301-0; National Science Foundation Grant Numbers OCE-1061883, EF-0424599, OCE-1155438, OCE-1059884, OCE-1031143; Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Grant Numbers: 3301, 3789; Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution2016-03-2

Reconstructing phonon mean free path contributions to thermal conductivity using nanoscale membranes

Knowledge of the mean free path distribution of heat-carrying phonons is key to understanding phonon-mediated thermal transport. We demonstrate that thermal conductivity measurements of thin membranes spanning a wide thickness range can be used to characterize how bulk thermal conductivity is distributed over phonon mean free paths. A non-contact transient thermal grating technique was used to measure the thermal conductivity of suspended Si membranes ranging from 15 to 1500 nm in thickness. A decrease in the thermal conductivity from 74% to 13% of the bulk value is observed over this thickness range, which is attributed to diffuse phonon boundary scattering. Due to the well-defined relation between the membrane thickness and phonon mean free path suppression, combined with the range and accuracy of the measurements, we can reconstruct the bulk thermal conductivity accumulation vs. phonon mean free path, and compare with theoretical models

Studies of non-diffusive heat conduction through spatially periodic and time-harmonic thermal excitations

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2015.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 127-133).Studies of non-diffusive heat conduction provide insight into the fundamentals of heat transport in condensed matter. The mean free paths (MFPs) of phonons that are most important for conducting heat are well represented by a material's thermal conductivity accumulation function. Determining thermal conductivity accumulation functions experimentally by studying conduction in non-diffusive regimes is a recent area of study called phonon MFP spectroscopy. In this thesis, we investigate nondiffusive transport both experimentally and theoretically to advance methods for determining thermal conductivity accumulation functions in materials. We explore both spatially periodic and time-harmonic thermal excitations as a means for probing the non-diffusive transport regime, where the Fourier heat diffusion law breaks down. Boltzmann transport equation calculations of one-dimensional (1D) spatially sinusoidal thermal excitations are performed for gray-medium and fully spectral cases. We compare our calculations to simplified transport models and demonstrate that a model based on integrating gray-medium solutions can reasonably model materials with a narrow range of dominant heat-carrying phonon MFPs. We also consider the inverse problem of determining thermal conductivity accumulation functions from experimental measurements of thermal-length-scale-dependent effective thermal conductivity. Based on experimental measurements of Si membranes of varying thickness, we reproduce the thermal conductivity accumulation function for bulk Si. To investigate materials with short phonon MFPs, we developed an experimental approach based on microfabricating 1D wire grid polarizers on the surface of a material under study. This work finds that the dominant thermal length scales in polycrystalline Bi 2Te3 are smaller than 100 nm. We also determine that even small amounts of direct sample optical excitation, which occurs when light transmits through the grating and directly excites electron-hole pairs in the substrate, can appreciably influence the measured results, suggesting that an alternate approach that prevents all direct optical excitation is preferable. To study thermal length scales smaller than 100 nm without the need for microfabrication, we develop a method for extracting high frequency response information from transient optical measurements. For a periodic heat flux input, the thermal penetration depth in a semi-infinite sample depends on the excitation frequency, with higher frequencies leading to shallower thermal penetration depths. Prior work using frequencies as high as 200 MHz observed apparent non-diffusive behavior. Our method allows for frequencies of at least 1 GHz, but we do not observe any deviation from the heat diffusion equation, suggesting that prior observations attributed to non-diffusive effects were likely the result of transport phenomena in the metal transducer.by Kimberlee Chiyoko Collins.Ph. D

Experimental Investigation of Metal-Diamond Thermal Interface Conductance With Different Diamond Surface Terminations

Synthetic diamond has potential as a heat spreading material due to its uniquely high thermal conductivity. In small-scale devices, interfaces can dominate the resistance to heat transport, and thus play an important role in determining device performance. Here we use transient thermoreflectance techniques to measure the thermal interface conductance at metal-diamond interfaces. We study single crystal diamond samples with various surface terminations. We measure thermal interface conductance values over a range of temperatures from 88 K to 300 K, and find roughly 60 percent higher thermal interface conductance between Al and oxygenated diamond samples as compared to hydrogen terminated samples. The results reported here will be useful for device design and for advancing models of interfacial heat transport.MIT Energy Initiative. Seed Fund Progra

Non-diffusive relaxation of a transient thermal grating analyzed with the Boltzmann transport equation

The relaxation of an one-dimensional transient thermal grating (TTG) in a medium with phonon-mediated thermal transport is analyzed within the framework of the Boltzmann transport equation (BTE), with the goal of extracting phonon mean free path (MFP) information from TTG measurements of non-diffusive phonon transport. Both gray-medium (constant MFP) and spectrally dependent MFP models are considered. In the gray-medium approximation, an analytical solution is derived. For large TTG periods compared to the MFP, the model yields an exponential decay of grating amplitude with time in agreement with Fourier's heat diffusion equation, and at shorter periods, phonon transport transitions to the ballistic regime, with the decay becoming strongly non-exponential. Spectral solutions are obtained for Si and PbSe at 300 K using phonon dispersion and lifetime data from density functional theory calculations. The spectral decay behaviors are compared to several approximate models: a single MFP solution, a frequency-integrated gray-medium model, and a "two-fluid" BTE solution. We investigate the utility of using the approximate models for the reconstruction of phonon MFP distributions from non-diffusive TTG measurements

Reconstructing phonon mean-free-path contributions to thermal conductivity using nanoscale membranes

Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 (CC-BY).Knowledge of the mean-free-path distribution of heat-carrying phonons is key to understanding phonon-mediated thermal transport. We demonstrate that thermal conductivity measurements of thin membranes spanning a wide thickness range can be used to characterize how bulk thermal conductivity is distributed over phonon mean free paths. A noncontact transient thermal grating technique was used to measure the thermal conductivity of suspended Si membranes ranging from 15–1500 nm in thickness. A decrease in the thermal conductivity from 74–13% of the bulk value is observed over this thickness range, which is attributed to diffuse phonon boundary scattering. Due to the well-defined relation between the membrane thickness and phonon mean-free-path suppression, combined with the range and accuracy of the measurements, we can reconstruct the bulk thermal conductivity accumulation vs. phonon mean free path, and compare with theoretical models.We acknowledge support from “Solid State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Centre (S3TEC),” an Energy Frontier Research Centre funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Grant No. DE-SC0001299/DE-FG02-09ER46577, the Academy of Finland under Grant No. 252598, and the EU FP7 ENERGY FET project MERGING Grant Agreement No. 309150 and the Spanish Plan Nacional project TAPHOR (MAT-2012-31392).Peer Reviewe