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Creators/Authors contains: "Wu, Huan"

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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available March 1, 2025
  2. Controlling heat flow is a key challenge for applications ranging from thermal management in electronics to energy systems, industrial processing, and thermal therapy. However, progress has generally been limited by slow response times and low tunability in thermal conductance. In this work, we demonstrate an electronically gated solid-state thermal switch using self-assembled molecular junctions to achieve excellent performance at room temperature. In this three-terminal device, heat flow is continuously and reversibly modulated by an electric field through carefully controlled chemical bonding and charge distributions within the molecular interface. The devices have ultrahigh switching speeds above 1 megahertz, have on/off ratios in thermal conductance greater than 1300%, and can be switched more than 1 million times. We anticipate that these advances will generate opportunities in molecular engineering for thermal management systems and thermal circuit design.

     
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 3, 2024
  3. Abstract

    Twisted van der Waals materials featuring Moiré patterns present new design possibilities and demonstrate unconventional behaviors in electrical, optical, spintronic, and superconducting properties. However, experimental exploration of thermal transport across Moiré patterns has not been as extensive, despite its critical role in nanoelectronics, thermal management, and energy technologies. Here, the first experimental study is conducted on thermal transport across twisted graphene, demonstrating a phonon polarizer concept from the rotational misalignment between stacked layers. The direct thermal and acoustic measurements, structural characterizations, and atomistic modeling, reveal a modulation up to 631% in thermal conductance with various Moiré angles, while maintaining a high acoustic transmission. By comparing experiments with density functional theory and molecular dynamics simulations, mode‐dependent phonon transmissions are quantified based on the angle alignment of graphene band structures and attributed to the coupling among flexural phonon modes. The agreement confirms the dominant tuning mechanisms in adjusting phonon transmission from high‐frequency thermal modes while having negligible effects on low‐frequency acoustic modes near Brillouin zone center. This study offers crucial insights into the fundamental thermal transport in Moiré structures, opening avenues for the invention of quantum thermal devices and new design methodologies based on manipulations of vibrational band structures and phonon spectra.

     
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  4. Abstract

    Thermal management is the most critical technology challenge for modern electronics. Recent key materials innovation focuses on developing advanced thermal interface of electronic packaging for achieving efficient heat dissipation. Here, for the first time we report a record-high performance thermal interface beyond the current state of the art, based on self-assembled manufacturing of cubic boron arsenide (s-BAs). The s-BAs exhibits highly desirable characteristics of high thermal conductivity up to 21 W/m·K and excellent elastic compliance similar to that of soft biological tissues down to 100 kPa through the rational design of BAs microcrystals in polymer composite. In addition, the s-BAs demonstrates high flexibility and preserves the high conductivity over at least 500 bending cycles, opening up new application opportunities for flexible thermal cooling. Moreover, we demonstrated device integration with power LEDs and measured a superior cooling performance of s-BAs beyond the current state of the art, by up to 45 °C reduction in the hot spot temperature. Together, this study demonstrates scalable manufacturing of a new generation of energy-efficient and flexible thermal interface that holds great promise for advanced thermal management of future integrated circuits and emerging applications such as wearable electronics and soft robotics.

     
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  5. null (Ed.)