Synthetic iterative scheme for thermal applications in hotspot systems with large temperature variance

A synthetic iterative scheme is developed for thermal applications in hotspot systems with large temperature variance. Different from previous work with linearized equilibrium state and small temperature difference assumption, the phonon equilibrium distribution shows a nonlinear relationship with temperature and mean free path changes with the spatial temperature when the temperature difference of system is large, so that the same phonon mode may suffer different transport processes in different geometric regions. In order to efficiently capture nonlinear and multiscale thermal behaviors, the Newton method is used and a macroscopic iteration is introduced for preprocessing based on the iterative solutions of the stationary phonon BTE. Macroscopic and mesoscopic physical evolution processes are connected by the heat flux, which is no longer calculated by classical Fourier’s law but obtained by taking the moment of phonon distribution function. These two processes exchange information from different scales, such that the present scheme could efficiently deal with heat conduction problems from ballistic to diffusive regime. Numerical tests show that the present scheme could efficiently capture the multiscale heat conduction in hotspot systems with large temperature variances. In addition, a comparison is made between the solutions of the present scheme and effective Fourier’s law by several heat dissipations problems under different sizes or selective phonon excitation. Numerical results show that compared to the classical Fourier’s law, the results of the effective Fourier’s law could be closer to the BTE solutions by adjusting effective coefficients. However, it is still difficult to capture some local nonlinear phenomena in complex geometries.