Degradation and failure of field emitting carbon nanotube arrays.

It has been observed experimentally that the collective field emission from an array of Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) exhibits fluctuation and degradation, and produces thermal spikes, resulting in electro-mechanical fatigue and failure of CNTs. Based on a new coupled multiphysics model incorporating the electron-phonon transport and thermo-electrically activated breakdown, a novel method for estimating accurately the lifetime of CNT arrays has been developed in this paper. The main results are discussed for CNT arrays during the field emission process. It is shown that the time-to-failure of CNT arrays increases with the decrease in the angle of tip orientation. This observation has important ramifications for such areas as biomedical X-ray devices using patterned films of CNTs.

On computational control of flow in airblast atomisers for pulmonary drug delivery.

Among different approaches to successful pharmacotherapy the pulmonary drug delivery (PDD) mode plays an increasingly important role. In this paper PDD systems based on air-blast atomisation have been analysed mathematically. In order to allow the bioengineer to estimate the degree of effectiveness of a specific system prototype and to lay the basic principles for design, a conservation-law-based mathematical model is discussed. Key control parameters that allow improvement in the efficiency of the system have been identified and main characteristics of the system have been analysed numerically as functions of these parameters.

Transport in semiconductor nanowire superlattices described by coupled quantum mechanical and kinetic models.

In this paper we develop a kinetic model for the analysis of semiconductor superlattices, accounting for quantum effects. The model consists of a Boltzmann-Poisson type system of equations with simplified Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook collisions, obtained from the general time-dependent Schrödinger-Poisson model using Wigner functions. This system for superlattice transport is supplemented by the quantum mechanical part of the model based on the Ben-Daniel-Duke form of the Schrödinger equation for a cylindrical superlattice of finite radius. The resulting energy spectrum is used to characterize the Fermi-Dirac distribution that appears in the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook collision, thereby coupling the quantum mechanical and kinetic parts of the model. The kinetic model uses the dispersion relation obtained by the generalized Kronig-Penney method, and allows us to estimate radii of quantum wire superlattices that have the same miniband widths as in experiments. It also allows us to determine more accurately the time-dependent characteristics of superlattices, in particular their current density. Results, for several experimentally grown superlattices, are discussed in the context of self-sustained coherent oscillations of the current density which are important in an increasing range of current and potential applications.

Parallelization of the Wolff single-cluster algorithm.

A parallel [open multiprocessing (OpenMP)] implementation of the Wolff single-cluster algorithm has been developed and tested for the three-dimensional (3D) Ising model. The developed procedure is generalizable to other lattice spin models and its effectiveness depends on the specific application at hand. The applicability of the developed methodology is discussed in the context of the applications, where a sophisticated shuffling scheme is used to generate pseudorandom numbers of high quality, and an iterative method is applied to find the critical temperature of the 3D Ising model with a great accuracy. For the lattice with linear size L=1024, we have reached the speedup about 1.79 times on two processors and about 2.67 times on four processors, as compared to the serial code. According to our estimation, the speedup about three times on four processors is reachable for the O(n) models with n> or =2. Furthermore, the application of the developed OpenMP code allows us to simulate larger lattices due to greater operative (shared) memory available.

Electromechanical interactions in a carbon nanotube based thin film field emitting diode.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have emerged as promising candidates for biomedical x-ray devices and other applications of field emission. CNTs grown/deposited in a thin film are used as cathodes for field emission. In spite of the good performance of such cathodes, the procedure to estimate the device current is not straightforward and the required insight towards design optimization is not well developed. In this paper, we report an analysis aided by a computational model and experiments by which the process of evolution and self-assembly (reorientation) of CNTs is characterized and the device current is estimated. The modeling approach involves two steps: (i) a phenomenological description of the degradation and fragmentation of CNTs and (ii) a mechanics based modeling of electromechanical interaction among CNTs during field emission. A computational scheme is developed by which the states of CNTs are updated in a time incremental manner. Finally, the device current is obtained by using the Fowler-Nordheim equation for field emission and by integrating the current density over computational cells. A detailed analysis of the results reveals the deflected shapes of the CNTs in an ensemble and the extent to which the initial state of geometry and orientation angles affect the device current. Experimental results confirm these effects.