Thermal Nanostructure Design by Materials Informatics

Tuning thermal transport by nanostructures has garnered increasing attentions as thermal materials with either high or low thermal conductivities are of great use in a wide range of applications like thermal management, thermal barriers, and thermoelectrics. Due to the superhigh degree of freedoms in terms of atom types and structural configurations, traditional searching algorithm may be powerless to find the optimal nanostructures with limited time and computation expenses, and thus the big-data-driven materials informatics (MI), as the fourth paradigm, has emerged and become prevalent. In this chapter, beginning with the brief introduction of the MI algorithms, we emphasize on the progress on MI-based thermal nanostructure designs, ranging from heat conduction through Si/Ge and GaAs/AlAs superlattices, graphene nanoribbons, to thermal emission for radiative cooling, ultranarrow emission, thermophotovoltaic system, and thermal camouflage. The remaining challenges and opportunities in this field are outlined and prospected.