No Arabic abstract
Nowadays the world is facing a prominent paradox regarding thermal energy. The production of heat accounts for more than 50% of global final energy consumption while the waste heat potential analysis reveals that 72% of the global primary energy consumption is lost after conversion mainly in the form of heat. Towards global decarbonization, it is of vital importance to establish a solution to thermal energy utilization under full control. Here, we propose and realize an unprecedented concept -- barocaloric thermal batteries based on the inverse colossal barocaloric effect of NH4SCN. Thermal charging is initialized upon pressurization through an order-to-disorder phase transition below 364 K and in turn the discharging of 43 J g-1, which are eleven times more than the input mechanical energy, occurs on demand at depressurization at lower temperatures. The discharging is also manifested as a directly measured temperature rise of 12 K. The thermodynamic equilibrium nature of the pressure-restrained heat-carrying phase guarantees stable storage and/or transport over a variety of temporal and/or spatial scales. The barocaloric thermal batteries reinforced by their solid microscopic mechanism are expected to significantly advance the ability to take advantage of waste heat.
We report on the first model of a thermal transistor to control heat flow. Like its electronic counterpart, our thermal transistor is a three-terminal device with the important feature that the current through the two terminals can be controlled by small changes in the temperature or in the current through the third terminal. This control feature allows us to switch the device between off (insulating) and on (conducting) states or to amplify a small current. The thermal transistor model is possible because of the negative differential thermal resistance.
We present a DFT study utilizing the Hubbard U correction to probe structural and magnetic disorder in $mathrm{NaO_{2}}$, primary discharge product of Na-O$_2$ batteries. We show that $mathrm{NaO_{2}}$ exhibits a large degree of rotational and magnetic disorder; a 3-body Ising Model is necessary to capture the subtle interplay of this disorder. MC simulations demonstrate that energetically favorable, FM phases near room temperature consist of alternating bands of orthogonally-oriented $mathrm{O_{2}}$ dimers. We find that bulk structures are insulating, with a subset of FM structures showing a moderate gap ($<2$ eV) in one spin channel.
A solid conducts heat through both transverse and longitudinal acoustic phonons, but a liquid employs only longitudinal vibrations. Here, we report that the crystalline solid AgCrSe2 has liquid-like thermal conduction. In this compound, Ag atoms exhibit a dynamic duality that they are exclusively involved in intense low-lying transverse acoustic phonons while they also undergo local fluctuations inherent in an order-to-disorder transition occurring at 450 K. As a consequence of this extreme disorder-phonon coupling, transverse acoustic phonons become damped as approaching the transition temperature, above which they are not defined anymore because their lifetime is shorter than the relaxation time of local fluctuations. Nevertheless, the damped longitudinal acoustic phonon survives for thermal transport. This microscopic insight might reshape the fundamental idea on thermal transport properties of matter and facilitates the optimization of thermoelectrics.
We study the size dependence of thermal conductivity in nanoscale semiconducting systems. An analytical formula including the surface scattering and the size confinement effects of phonon transport is derived. The theoretical formula gives good agreements with the existing experimental data for Si and GaAs nanowires and thin films.
We study thermal rectifying effect in two dimensional (2D) systems consisting of the Frenkel Kontorva (FK) lattice and the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) lattice. It is found that the rectifying effect is related to the asymmetrical interface thermal resistance. The rectifying efficiency is typically about two orders of magnitude which is large enough to be observed in experiment. The dependence of rectifying efficiency on the temperature and temperature gradient is studied. The underlying mechanism is found to be the match and mismatch of the spectra of lattice vibration in two parts.