Abstract
Grain-boundary engineering is an effective strategy to tune the thermal conductivity of materials, leading to improved performance in thermoelectric, thermal-barrier coatings, and thermal management applications. Despite the central importance to thermal transport, a clear understanding of how grain boundaries modulate the microscale heat flow is missing, owing to the scarcity of local investigations. Here, thermal imaging of individual grain boundaries is demonstrated in thermoelectric SnTe via spatially resolved frequency-domain thermoreflectance. Measurements with microscale resolution reveal local suppressions in thermal conductivity at grain boundaries. Also, the grain-boundary thermal resistance – extracted by employing a Gibbs excess approach – is found to be correlated with the grain-boundary misorientation angle. Extracting thermal properties, including thermal boundary resistances, from microscale imaging can provide comprehensive understanding of how microstructure affects heat transport, crucially impacting the materials design of high-performance thermal-management and energy-conversion devices.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 2302777 |
| Journal | Advanced Materials |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue number | 38 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 21 2023 |
Funding
The authors would like to acknowledge Zackery Thune, Dr. Askeland, Prof. Boehlert and Tanzilur Raman of Michigan State University, and Ruben Bueno‐Villoro of the Max‐Planck‐Institut für Eisenforschung for useful help and discussion on the EBSD data collection and analysis. This work was supported by the Northwestern University Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience through the SEED funded project entitled ‘Toward Engineering Metamaterials for Sustainable Energy Solutions: Local Thermal Properties of Grain Boundaries in Polycrystalline Materials.’ G.J.S. acknowledges the support of award 70NANB19H005 from the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology as part of the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD). A.Z. acknowledges funding from DOE Basic Energy Sciences grant DE‐SC0019252. This work made use of the SPID facility of Northwestern University's NUANCE Center, which received support from the SHyNE Resource (NSF ECCS‐2025633), the IIN, and Northwestern's MRSEC program (NSF DMR‐1720139). This work made use of the NUFAB facility of the Northwestern University NUANCE Center, which received support from the SHyNE Resource (NSF ECCS‐2025633), the IIN, and the Northwestern University MRSEC (NSF DMR‐1720139). The authors would like to acknowledge Zackery Thune, Dr. Askeland, Prof. Boehlert and Tanzilur Raman of Michigan State University, and Ruben Bueno-Villoro of the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung for useful help and discussion on the EBSD data collection and analysis. This work was supported by the Northwestern University Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience through the SEED funded project entitled ‘Toward Engineering Metamaterials for Sustainable Energy Solutions: Local Thermal Properties of Grain Boundaries in Polycrystalline Materials.’ G.J.S. acknowledges the support of award 70NANB19H005 from the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology as part of the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD). A.Z. acknowledges funding from DOE Basic Energy Sciences grant DE-SC0019252. This work made use of the SPID facility of Northwestern University's NUANCE Center, which received support from the SHyNE Resource (NSF ECCS-2025633), the IIN, and Northwestern's MRSEC program (NSF DMR-1720139). This work made use of the NUFAB facility of the Northwestern University NUANCE Center, which received support from the SHyNE Resource (NSF ECCS-2025633), the IIN, and the Northwestern University MRSEC (NSF DMR-1720139).
Keywords
- Gibbs excess
- Kapitza resistance
- SnTe
- frequency domain thermoreflectance
- grain boundaries
- thermal conductivity
- thermal imaging
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Materials Science
- Mechanics of Materials
- Mechanical Engineering