AME585

Targeted to students with a traditional engineering background, this course will provide the fundamental knowledge on the thermal energy transport across all length and time scales, while showing how these fundamental understanding can be employed to develop advanced energy-related materials or improve the thermal management of electronic devices. Topics include the energy levels, the statistical behavior and internal energy, energy transport in the forms of waves and particles, scattering and heat generation processes, Boltzmann equation and derivation of classical laws, deviation from classical laws at nanoscale and their appropriate descriptions. The state-of-the-art development of nanoscale heat transfer will be reviewed, including the studies on various micro- to nano-structures (e.g. nanowire, superlattice, carbon nanotube, graphene), nanostructured bulk materials (e.g. thermoelectric nanocomposites), and nanoelectronics. The transport of different energy carriers (electrons, phonons, molecules, and photons) will be treated in parallel to show the similarities between different processes.

Spring