Largely reduced cross-plane thermal conductivity of nanoporous In<sub>0.1</sub>Ga<sub>0.9</sub>N thin films directly grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition

doi:10.1007/s11708-018-0519-5

Front. Energy

2018, Vol. 12

Issue (1) : 127-136 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11708-018-0519-5

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Largely reduced cross-plane thermal conductivity of nanoporous In_0.1Ga_0.9N thin films directly grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition

Dongchao XU¹, Quan WANG², Xuewang WU³, Jie ZHU³, Hongbo ZHAO¹, Bo XIAO¹, Xiaojia WANG³, Xiaoliang WANG², Qing HAO¹(

)

¹. Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, University of Arizona, 1130 N Mountain Ave, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
². Key laboratory of Semiconductor Materials Science, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China
³. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota,111 Church St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA

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Abstract

In recent year, nanoporous Si thin films have been widely studied for their potential applications in thermoelectrics, in which high thermoelectric performance can be obtained by combining both the dramatically reduced lattice thermal conductivity and bulk-like electrical properties. Along this line, a high thermoelectric figure of merit (ZT) is also anticipated for other nanoporous thin films, whose bulk counterparts possess superior electrical properties but also high lattice thermal conductivities. Numerous thermoelectric studies have been carried out on Si-based nanoporous thin films, whereas cost-effective nitrides and oxides are not systematically studied for similar thermoelectric benefits. In this work, the cross-plane thermal conductivities of nanoporous In_0.1Ga_0.9N thin films with varied porous patterns were measured with the time-domain thermoreflectance technique. These alloys are suggested to have better electrical properties than conventional Si_xGe₁₋_x alloys; however, a high ZT is hindered by their intrinsically high lattice thermal conductivity, which can be addressed by introducing nanopores to scatter phonons. In contrast to previous studies using dry-etched nanopores with amorphous pore edges, the measured nanoporous thin films of this work are directly grown on a patterned sapphire substrate to minimize the structural damage by dry etching. This removes the uncertainty in the phonon transport analysis due to amorphous pore edges. Based on the measurement results, remarkable phonon size effects can be found for a thin film with periodic 300-nm-diameter pores of different patterns. This indicates that a significant amount of heat inside these alloys is still carried by phonons with ~300 nm or longer mean free paths. Our studies provide important guidance for ZT enhancement in alloys of nitrides and similar oxides.

Keywords nanoporous film thermoelectrics phonon mean free path diffusive scattering

Corresponding Author(s): Qing HAO

Online First Date: 05 January 2018 Issue Date: 08 March 2018

Cite this article:

Dongchao XU,Quan WANG,Xuewang WU, et al. Largely reduced cross-plane thermal conductivity of nanoporous In_0.1Ga_0.9N thin films directly grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition[J]. Front. Energy, 2018, 12(1): 127-136.

URL:

https://academic.hep.com.cn/fie/EN/10.1007/s11708-018-0519-5
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fie/EN/Y2018/V12/I1/127

Fig.1 SEM images of the as prepared nanoporous In_0.1Ga_0.9N films with (a) aligned pores or (b) hexagonally aligned pores (The scale bar is 5 mm for both cases)

Fig.2 Thermal conductivity accumulation function for bulk GaN (Symbols, solid lines, and dashed lines are measurement data [55], prediction by Eq. (13), and predictions with

v g v p 2

to replace

v s 3

in Eq. (13), respectively. The analyzed temperatures are 415 K (blue) and 309 K (red).)

Tab.1 Employed parameters for GaN and InN. The sound velocities, which are v_s,_LA for the LA branch and v_s,_TA for the TA branch, are computed from previous studies [62].

Fig.3 (a) Thermal penetration depth d estimated for various In_xGa₁₋_xN compositions in [28]; (b) Comparison between model predictions and experimental results for In_xGa₁₋_xN thin films.

Fig.4 Comparison between the measured and predicted k values for tri-layered nanoporous GaN-based films (Here filled circles are for hexagonal patterns, whereas empty squares are for patterns on a square lattice. Using slightly different phonon MFPs for bulk GaN, the green dashed line and black solid line overlap with each other.)

Fig.5 Room-temperature thermal conductivity accumulation function for bulk GaN and In_0.1Ga_0.9N alloys

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