Investigation of thermal inter-facial problems involving non-locality in space and time

The vastly disparate length and time scales existing in new devices and materials born out of micro-/nano- devices have made thermal modeling and simulation more important and more difficult. The heat transfer process in one certain micro-device is essentially a thermal contact problem that involves various scales of space and time in each of the sub-components. In this communication, we utilize a newly developed computational framework to investigate problems of thermal contact involving size-effects that span the ballistic, ballistic-diffusive, and diffusive heat transfer processes. The preliminary work regarding this generalized computational framework has been published in Xue, Zhang, and Tamma (2018) and has been proved to readily resolve the problem of thermal contact between Fourier-type and nonFourier-type sub-domains. The fashion of solving the thermal inter-facial problems from the perspective of differential-algebraic equations is extended to a broad range of thermal contact problems in the present work, including both the temporal and spatial non-locality. The numerical results demonstrate the prediction of thermal response of the bodies in contact at different scales. The proposed computational framework paves the way for investigating the thermal inter-facial problems in micro-/nano- devices.