UVA Researchers Harness the Power of a New Solid-State Thermal Technology

This advancement continues a longstanding collaboration between Jon Ihlefeld, UVA Engineering’s associate professor of materials science and engineering and electrical and computer engineering, and Patrick E. Hopkins, Whitney Stone Professor of Engineering and professor of mechanical and aerospace and engineering and Aryana’s advisor.

The Ihlefeld-Hopkins team has pioneered tunable thermal conductivity in crystalline materials over the course of a decade, first at Sandia National Laboratories and now at UVA.

Tunability is unique to a class of functional materials called ferroelectrics, a specialty of Ihlefeld’s Multifunctional Thin-Film research group.  

“A ferroelectric material is like a magnet, except instead of a north and south pole, you have a positive and negative charge,” Ihlefeld said. An electric field, or voltage, when applied to a ferroelectric material, “flips” the polarity of the material’s surface to its opposite state, where it remains until an opposite voltage is applied.

“Usually, thermal conductivity is considered a static material property,” Hopkins said. “If you want to change a thermal conductor into an insulator, you have to permanently change its structure or integrate it with a new material.”

Ihlefeld’s and Hopkins’ prior research demonstrated how to lower thermal conductivity with an electric field, and how to integrate the material within a device to make thermal conductivity rise, but they could not make the same material do both.

For this project, the team used an antiferroelectric material in which heat and voltage both come into play.

“What this interesting material does, in addition to being a high-quality crystal that has thermal conductivity trends like an amorphous glass, in addition to being solid-state, is it gives us two unique knobs to change thermal conductivity,” Hopkins said. “We can rapidly heat the crystal with a laser or apply voltage to actively tune thermal conductivity and heat transport.” 

“We tried to use a commercial sample of lead zirconate for testing bi-directional thermal conductivity, but it didn’t work,” Aryana said. Lane Martin, Chancellor's Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and department chair at the University of California Berkeley, provided an extremely pure sample of lead zirconate. “Using Lane’s sample, we achieved a 38% bi-directional change in thermal conductivity in one burst, which is a huge leap,” Aryana said.

Antiferroelectric material structures are bi-directional by nature. In the smallest repeat unit of the crystal lattice, one half has a polarity pointing up and the other half points down, such that the positive and negative charges cancel each other out. When heated, the crystal structure changes and the antiferroelectricity goes away, increasing thermal conductivity. Applying an electric field does the opposite – it causes the material to transform into a ferroelectric and the thermal conductivity decreases. The net polarity returns to zero when the voltage is removed.

The flip in polarity and the arrangement of atoms in the crystal that support the anti-ferroelectric structure leads to observable and measurable thermal scattering events — something like a heat signature — which means energy diffuses through the material in ways that can be predicted and controlled.

Members of Hopkins’ Experiments and Simulations in Thermal Engineering research group have made many advances in laser measurement of materials. The Nature Communications paper presents an innovation in optical thermometry-based experiments in which students employed a third laser to bring about a rapid heating event to modulate the antiferroelectric film through the transition from the antiferroelectric to paraelectric structure, giving it the ability to become polarized under an applied electric field.

To make an impact on technologies, engineers will need a bigger “on-off” switch to rapidly move or store a much larger percentage of heat. The next steps for the research team include working to better define the material’s limitations, so they can design a new material with higher switching ratios, accelerating the use of actively tunable thermal conductivity materials.

Grants from the National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy supported this research.