OpenBTE: A Multiscale Solver for the Phonon Boltzmann Transport Equation

We present OpenBTE, an open-source tool to compute heat transport in nanostructured materials with arbitrary shape and dimensionality. The code solves the space-dependent Boltzmann transport equation taking into account the material’s Brillouin’s zone and diffuse boundaries. For phonon mean-free-paths (MFP) that are much smaller than the characteristic length of the material, we employ a heat diffusion solver so that we lift most of the computational load with negligible loss in the accuracy [1,2]. After an introduction to OpenBTE’s main features, we will show the software architecture, including parallelization and interfaces to popular first-principles phonon solver. Then, we illustrate key examples and comparison with experiments. A brief tutorial will conclude the talk.
[1] G. Romano and J. C. Grossman. Journal of Heat Transfer 137.7 (2015): 071302.
[2] G. Romano and A. M. Kolpak. Journal of Heat Transfer 141.1 (2019): 012401.