Designing High Thermal Conductive Materials Using Artificial Evolution

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2014-04-15
Authors
Davies, Michael
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Mechanical Engineering
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Symposium on Undergraduate Research and Creative Expression
Iowa State University Conferences and Symposia

The Symposium provides undergraduates from all academic disciplines with an opportunity to share their research with the university community and other guests through conference-style oral presentations. The Symposium represents part of a larger effort of Iowa State University to enhance, support, and celebrate undergraduate research activity.

Though coordinated by the University Honors Program, all undergraduate students are eligible and encouraged to participate in the Symposium. Undergraduates conducting research but not yet ready to present their work are encouraged to attend the Symposium to learn about the presentation process and students not currently involved in research are encouraged to attend the Symposium to learn about the broad range of undergraduate research activities that are taking place at ISU.

The first Symposium was held in April 2007. The 39 students who presented research and their mentors collectively represented all of ISU's Colleges: Agriculture and Life Sciences, Business, Design, Engineering, Human Sciences, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Veterinary Medicine, and the Graduate College. The event has grown to regularly include more than 100 students presenting on topics that span the broad range of disciplines studied at ISU.

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Mechanical Engineering
Abstract

There is a growing need for efficient and effective methods of heat dissipation. One driving force for this need is computer processors. As the processor grows faster and more powerful, it requires more electricity to perform tasks which results in high amounts of heat generated. Designing materials with high thermal-conductivity can enable heat dissipation to allow faster and more powerful computers. Creating such materials is often a trial-and-error process by which several material composites are tested for desirable thermal conductivity. In this research, we employed the use of a genetic algorithm, which mimics the process of evolution through natural selection, as an alternative to exhaustive trial-and-error approaches to help design a graphene based template material with high thermal conductivity. The algorithm creates a population of randomly generated configurations, then uses an open source physics (molecular dynamics) simulator, LAMMPS, linked with High-Performance Computing to run a molecular dynamics simulation for each composite to derive a fitness, or score for the material. The highest scoring materials undergo crossover to create offspring for the next generation. Over time, these algorithms have the potential to find a composite with desirable conductivity through this pseudo-evolution process.

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