An implicit kinetic scheme for multiscale heat transfer problem accounting for phonon dispersion and polarization

TL;DR

This paper introduces an implicit kinetic scheme for solving the phonon Boltzmann transport equation that accounts for phonon dispersion and polarization, enabling efficient multiscale heat transfer simulations in materials like silicon.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel implicit scheme combining microscopic and macroscopic iterations to efficiently handle multiscale phonon transport with dispersion and polarization effects.

Findings

The scheme accurately predicts heat transfer in silicon with phonon dispersion.

It is significantly faster than traditional implicit DOM methods.

The method maintains low memory usage similar to Fourier solvers.

Abstract

An efficient implicit kinetic scheme is developed to solve the stationary phonon Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) based on the non-gray model including the phonon dispersion and polarization. Due to the wide range of the dispersed phonon mean free paths, the phonon transport under the non-gray model is essentially multiscale, and has to be solved differently and appropriately for varied phonon frequencies and branches. The proposed implicit kinetic scheme is composed of a microscopic iteration and a macroscopic iteration. The microscopic iteration is capable of automatically adapting with varied phonon mean free path of each phonon frequency and branch through solving the phonon BTE. The energy transfer of all phonons is gathered together by the microscopic iteration to evaluate the heat flux. The temperature field is predicted through a macroscopic heat transfer equation according to the heat flux, and the equilibrium state in the phonon BTE is also updated. The combination of the phonon BTE solver and the macroscopic equation makes the present method very efficient in a wide length scale. Three numerical tests, including the cross-plane, in-plane and nano-porous heat transfer in silicon, validate that the present scheme can handle with the phonon dispersion and polarization correctly and predict the multiscale heat transfer phenomena efficiently in a wide range. The present method could be tens of times faster than the typical implicit DOM and keeps the same amount of the memory requirements as the Fourier solver for multiscale heat transfer problem.