Thermal stability of solid nanowires

• Main Author: Shwe, Sin Win.
• Other Authors: Sun Changqing
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Nanoelectronics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/39999
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Nanostructures like nanotubes, nanowires, nanobelts and nanoclusters have amazing mechanical, electrical and thermal properties. They have attracted a great deal of interests in recent years, because of their importance in fundamental low-dimensional physics as well as potential applications in nanodevices technology. As one of the most important one dimensional (1D) nanometer materials, nanowires provide a good system to investigate the dependence of electrical and thermal transport on dimensionality and size reduction. Size is an important factor in studying nanoscale structure. The most significant characteristic of materials at nanosacle is their high surface-to-volume ratio which influences their properties. Nanowires have a number of exciting potential applications in nanoscale electronic devices, it is necessary to develop a quantitative understanding of the thermodynamic model to determine the size dependence of the melting temperature and deepen our understanding of its nature of such nanowires. The melting temperature of nanowires is one of the basic properties of materials, has different character from their bulk counterparts. Thus in this paper present the size dependency of melting temperature of nanowires in the perspective of cohesive energy which is a single bond energy multiples the coordination number. The relation between the cohesive energy of naowires is also discussed. It is known that the melting temperature and cohesive energy are parameters to describe the bond strength. As a result, the melting temperature of a solid is directly proportional to its cohesive energy. Thermal stability of nanowires’ mathematical simulation is revealed based on bond order-length-strength correlation model. The validity of the results is confirmed by the data of experiments and molecular dynamics simulations.