arXiv subjects

Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou

Publications and source records attributed to Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2012

An alternative approach to efficient simulation of micro/nanoscale phonon transport

Starting from the recently proposed energy-based deviational formulation for solving the Boltzmann equation [J.-P. Peraud and N. G. Hadjiconstantinou, Phys. Rev. B 84, 2011], which provides significant computational speedup compared to standard Monte Carlo methods for small deviations from equilibrium, we show that additional computational benefits are possible in the limit that the governing equation can be linearized. The proposed method exploits the observation that under linearized conditions (small temperature differences) the trajectories of individual deviational particles can be decoupled and thus simulated independently; this leads to a particularly simple and efficient algorithm for simulating steady and transient problems in arbitrary three-dimensional geometries, without introducing any additional approximation.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2011

Efficient simulation of multidimensional phonon transport using energy-based variance-reduced Monte Carlo formulations

We present a new Monte Carlo method for obtaining solutions of the Boltzmann equation for describing phonon transport in micro and nanoscale devices. The proposed method can resolve arbitrarily small signals (e.g. temperature differences) at small constant cost and thus represents a considerable improvement compared to traditional Monte Carlo methods whose cost increases quadratically with decreasing signal. This is achieved via a control-variate variance reduction formulation in which the stochastic particle description only solves for the deviation from a nearby equilibrium, while the latter is described analytically. We also show that simulating an energy-based Boltzmann equation results in an algorithm that lends itself naturally to exact energy conservation thereby considerably improving the simulation fidelity. Simulations using the proposed method are used to investigate the effect of porosity on the effective thermal conductivity of silicon. We also present simulations of a recently developed thermal conductivity spectroscopy process. The latter simulations demonstrate how the computational gains introduced by the proposed method enable the simulation of otherwise intractable multiscale phenomena.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2002

Statistical Error in Particle Simulations of Hydrodynamic Phenomena

We present predictions for the statistical error due to finite sampling in the presence of thermal fluctuations in molecular simulation algorithms. Specifically, we establish how these errors depend on Mach number, Knudsen number, number of particles, etc. Expressions for the common hydrodynamic variables of interest such as flow velocity, temperature, density, pressure, shear stress and heat flux are derived using equilibrium statistical mechanics. Both volume-averaged and surface-averaged quantities are considered. Comparisons between theory and computations using direct simulation Monte Carlo for dilute gases, and molecular dynamics for dense fluids, show that the use of equilibrium theory provides accurate results.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗