Vacuum Thermal Switch Made of Phase Transition Materials Considering Thin Film and Substrate Effects

TL;DR

This study develops a vacuum thermal switch using phase transition materials, specifically VO2, demonstrating significant heat transfer modulation through near-field radiation effects influenced by thin film and substrate considerations.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing thin-film VO2 structures with substrates, showing enhanced thermal switching performance over a range of vacuum gaps.

Findings

Over 80% heat transfer reduction at sub-30-nm gaps

50% heat transfer reduction at 1-micron gap

Improved switching effect with thin-film structures

Abstract

In the present study, we demonstrate a vacuum thermal switch based on near-field thermal radiation between phase transition materials, i.e., vanadium dioxide (VO2), whose phase changes from insulator to metal at 341 K. Similar modulation effect has already been demonstrated and it will be extended to thin-film structure with substrate in this paper. Strong coupling of surface phonon polaritons between two insulating VO2 plates significantly enhances the near-field heat flux, which on the other hand is greatly reduced when the VO2 emitter becomes metallic, resulting strong thermal switching effect. Fluctuational electrodynamics predicts more than 80% heat transfer reduction at sub-30-nm vacuum gaps and 50% at vacuum gap of 1 micron. By replacing the bulk VO2 receiver with a thin film of several tens of nanometers, the switching effect can be further improved over a broad range of vacuum gaps from 10 nm to 1 um. In addition, for the purpose of more practical setup in experiments and applications, the SiO2 substrate effect is also considered for the structure with thin-film emitter or receiver.