Mazumder Receives Three-Year NSF Award

Associate Professor Sandip Mazumder has received a three-year grant of $400,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF), for the project entitled “Large-Scale Computation of the Phonon Boltzmann Transport Equation." His research will be conducted in collaboration with Computer Science and Engineering Professor Ponnuswamy Sadayappan, who is the co-principal investigator.

The award was granted through the NSF Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering (CDS&E) Program. The abstract for Mazumder’s research states that one of the major stumbling blocks in advancing further miniaturization of electronic and optoelectronic devices is the inability to efficiently remove heat and thus avoid overheating of miniature devices.

The project will develop a powerful simulation framework that will, in part, predict the heat transport in semiconductor materials over a range of length scales spanning all the way from nanometers to millimeters. The research will pave the way for simulation-driven discovery of new material systems being used in applications such as thermo-electric energy conversion, Peltier cooling, solid-state sensing, and semiconductor lasers. The high performance computational tools developed in this project are expected to have broader impact on materials modeling, computational mechanics, computational fluid dynamics, and computational electromagnetics.