The improvement of thermoelectric figure of merit of silicon nanowire (SiNW) can be achieved by lowering its thermal conductivity. In this work, non-equilibrium molecular dynamics method was used to demonstrate that the thermal conductivity of bulk silicon crystal is drastically reduced when it is crafted as SiNW and that it can be reduced remarkably by including vacancy defects. It has been found that 'centre vacancy defect' contributes much more in reducing the thermal conductance than 'surface vacancy defect'. The lowest thermal conductivity that occurs is about 52.1% of that of pristine SiNW, when 2% vacancy defect is introduced in the nanowire. The vibrational density of states analysis was performed to understand the nature of this reduction and it has been found that the various boundary scatterings of phonon significantly reduce the thermal conductivity. Also, larger mass difference due to voids induces smaller thermal conductivity values. These results indicate that the inclusion of vacancy defects can enhance the thermoelectric performance of SiNWs.
Digital light processing (DLP) is an emerging vatphotopolymerization-based 3D-printing technology where full layers of photosensitive resin are irradiated and cured with projected ultraviolet (UV) light to create a three-dimensional part layer-by-layer. Recent breakthroughs in polymer chemistry have led to a growing number of UV-curable elastomeric photoresins developed exclusively for vat photopolymerization additive manufacturing (AM). Coupled with the practical manufacturing advantages of DLP AM (e.g., industry-leading print speeds and sub-micron-level print resolution), these novel elastomeric photoresins are compelling candidates for emerging applications requiring extreme flexibility, stretchability, conformability, and mechanically-tunable stiffness (e.g., soft robotic actuators and stretchable electronics). To advance the role of DLP AM in these novel and promising technological spaces, a fundamental understanding of the impact of DLP manufacturing process parameters on mechanical properties is requisite. This paper highlights our recent efforts to explore the process-property relationship for ELAST-BLK 10, a new commercially-available UV-curable elastomer for DLP AM. A full factorial design of experiments is used to investigate the effect of build orientation and layer thickness on the quasi-static tensile properties (i.e., small-strain elastic modulus, ultimate tensile strength, and elongation at fracture) of ELAST-BLK 10. Statistical results, based on a general linear model via ANOVA methods, indicate that specimens with a flat build orientation exhibit the highest elastic modulus, ultimate tensile strength, and elongation at fracture, likely due to a larger surface area that enhances crosslink density during the curing process. Several popular hyperelastic constitutive models (e.g., Mooney-Rivlin, Yeoh, and Gent) are calibrated to our quasi-static tensile data to facilitate component-level predictive analyses (e.g., finite-element modeling) of soft robotic actuators and other emerging soft-matter applications.
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