Toward reversing Joule heating with a phonon-absorbing heterobarrier

Remote Joule heating by a carbon nanotube.

Minimizing Joule heating remains an important goal in the design of electronic devices. The prevailing model of Joule heating relies on a simple semiclassical picture in which electrons collide with the atoms of a conductor, generating heat locally and only in regions of non-zero current density, and this model has been supported by most experiments. Recently, however, it has been predicted tha...

Heterobarrier for converting hot-phonon energy to electric potential

We show that hot phonons emitted in energy conversion or resistive processes can be converted to electric potential in heterobarrier structures. Using phonon and electron interaction kinetics and self-consistent ensemble Monte Carlo, we find the favorable conditions for unassisted absorption of hot phonons and design graded heterobarriers for their direct conversion into electric energy. Tandem...

Joule heating in single-walled carbon nanotubes

Joule heating in single-walled carbon nanotubes CNTs using a quantum mechanical approach is presented in this paper. The modeling is based on the energy transfer between the electrons and both acoustic and optical phonons. In this formulation, only the knowledge of the full energy dispersion relation, phonon dispersion relation, and the electron-phonon coupling potential is required for the cal...

Joule Heating Effects on Insulator-based Dielectrophoresis

ABSTRACT We present an experimental and numerical study of Joule heating in a polymeric insulator-based dielectrophoresis (iDEP) device. In this study, we used a microscale thermometry technique based upon the temperature-sensitive fluorescence of Rhodamine B dye to monitor the fluid temperature within our iDEP microfluidic devices. We then complemented our experiments with 3D finite element si...

Picosecond Joule heating in photoconductive switch electrodes