A Review of Microscale Transport in the Thermal Processing of New and Emerging Advanced Materials

This paper reviews the microscale transport processes that arise in the fabrication of advanced materials. In many cases, the dimensions of the device being fabricated are in the micrometer length scale and, in others, underlying transformations that determine product quality and characteristics are at micro- or nanoscale levels. The basic considerations in these transport phenomena are outlined. A few important materials processing circumstances are considered in detail. These include the fabrication of multilayer and hollow optical fibers, as well as those where micro- and nanoscale dopants are added to achieve desired optical characteristics, thin film fabrication by chemical vapor deposition, and microscale coating of fibers and devices. It is shown that major challenges are posed by the simulation and experimentation, as compared with those for engineering or macroscale dimensions. These include accurate simulation to capture large gradients and variations over relatively small dimensions, simulating high pressures and viscous dissipation effects in microchannels, modeling effects such as surface tension that become dominant at microscale dimensions, and coupling micro- and nanoscale mechanisms with boundary conditions imposed at the macroscale. Similarly, measurements over microscale dimensions are much more involved than those over macro- or industrial scales because of difficult access to the regions of interest, relatively small effects such as tension, buoyancy effects, viscous rupture, bubble entrapment, and other mechanisms that are difficult to measure and that can make the process infeasible. It thus becomes difficult to achieve desired accuracy for validating the mathematical and numerical models. This paper reviews some of the approaches that have been adopted to overcome these difficulties. Comparisons between experimental and numerical results are included to show fairly good agreement, indicating the validity of the modeling of transport.