Advised by Myung S. Jhon
As the characteristic length of a solid system becomes smaller, the ability to model sub-continuum energy transfer effects has become increasingly important. It is now well established that the conventional Fourier analysis of heat transfer leads to erroneous results when the mean free path of the heat carriers becomes comparable or larger than the characteristic length of the domain of interest. In addition, conventional Fourier analysis assumes an instantaneous heat propagation, which leads to significant errors in the thermal predictions as the time scale of interest is smaller than the relaxation time of the heat carriers. To overcome these issues, physics based models are developed in this work to accurately predict the thermal phenomena of nanoscale systems.