Zhongwei Zhang

The reduced dimensionality makes low-dimensional nanomaterials possessing diverse unusual size-dependent transport properties, due to the distinct quantum confinement, surface and interfacial scatterings for electron, photon and phonon at the nanoscale. In this review, we summarize the state-of-the-art studies on the topic of size-dependent phononic thermal transport in low-dimensional nanomaterials, including both theoretical and experimental reports. First, the length-dependent thermal transpo

Modern society is hungry for electrical power. To improve the efficiency of energy harvesting from heat, extensive efforts seek high-performance thermoelectric materials that possess large differences between electronic and thermal conductance. Here we report a super high-performance material of consisting of MoS2/WS2 hybrid nanoribbons discovered from a theoretical investigation using nonequilibrium Green's function methods combined with first-principles calculations and molecular dynamics simu

From the mathematic category of surface Gaussian curvature, carbon allotropes can be classified into three types: zero curvature, positive curvature, and negative curvature. By performing Green-Kubo equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations, we found that surface curvature has a significant impact on the phonon vibration and thermal conductivity (κ) of carbon crystals. When curving from zero curvature to negative or positive curvature structures, κ is reduced by several orders of magnitude. Int

Nano-phononic crystals have attracted a great deal of research interest in the field of nanoscale thermal transport due to their unique coherent thermal transport behavior. So far, there have been many advances in the theory and simulation studies of coherent thermal transport in nano-phononic crystals. In this paper, we summarize the state-of-the-art studies in this field from the perspective of coherent thermal transport at low temperatures, minimum thermal conductivity, Anderson localization,

Abstract Thermal transport in amorphous materials has remained one of the fundamental questions in solid state physics while involving a very large field of applications. Using a heat conduction theory incorporating coherence, we demonstrate that the strong phase correlation between local and non-propagating modes, commonly named diffusons in the terminology of amorphous systems, triggers the conduction of heat. By treating the thermal vibrations as collective excitations, the significant contri

Our direct atomic simulations reveal that a thermally activated phonon mode involves a large population of elastic wave packets. These excitations are characterized by a wide distribution of lifetimes and coherence times expressing particlelike and wavelike natures. In agreement with direct simulations, our theoretical derivation yields a generalized law for the decay of the phonon number taking into account coherent effects. Before the conventional exponential decay due to phonon-phonon scatter

Thermal conductivity of nanowires (NWs) is a crucial criterion to assess the operating performance of NWs-based device applications, such as in the field of heat dissipation, thermal management, and thermoelectrics. Therefore, numerous research interests have been focused on controlling and manipulating thermal conductivity of one-dimensional materials in the past decade. In this review, we summarize the state-of-the-art research status on thermal conductivity of NWs from both experimental and t

To improve the design of lightweight, high-performance bulletproof armors, three columnar ceramic/fiber laminate composite armors were designed and prepared, and their ballistic behavior against 7.62 mm armor-piercing bullets was investigated. Through the microcomputed tomography (micro-CT) analysis of target samples, B4C ceramics were found to exhibit better comprehensive bulletproof properties than SiC ceramics, with a 142 % improvement in the protection margin. The design realized by combinin

Hydrodynamic phonon transport in solids exhibits unique thermal transport behaviors, such as second sound, the Poiseuille flow, and ultrahigh thermal conductivity. However, those have been limited up to the cryogenic temperature ($\ensuremath{\sim}1$ K) for a few materials. In this work, by employing the phonon Boltzmann transport equation, we demonstrate hydrodynamic phonon transport in organic systems such as bulk crystalline polymers. Remarkable hydrodynamic phonon transport up to 50 K is dem

Inspired by the successful synthesis of three two-dimensional (2D) allotropes, the boron sheet has recently been one of the hottest 2D materials around. However, to date, phonon transport properties of these new materials are still unknown. By using the non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) combined with the first principles method, we study ballistic phonon transport in three types of boron sheets; two of them correspond to the structures reported in the experiments, while the third one is a

Heat dissipation is a very critical problem for designing nano-functional devices, including MoS2/graphene heterojunctions. In this paper we investigate thermal transport in MoS2/graphene hybrid nanosheets under various heating conditions, by using molecular dynamics simulation. Diverse transport processes and characteristics, depending on the conducting layers, are found in these structures. The thermal conductivities can be tuned by interlayer coupling, environment temperature, and interlayer