Structure, mechanical properties, and thermal transport in microporous silicon nitride—molecular-dynamics simulations on a parallel machine

Equilibrium and non-equilibrium molecular-dynamics simulations are performed to determine the structure, mechanical properties, and thermal conductivity of amorphous silicon nitride under uniform dilation. For mass densities below ρ = 2.6 g/cc, we observe a significant growth of pores. Near 2.0 g/cc the average pore volume diverges with an exponent of 1.95. The thermal conductivity and Young's modulus are found to scale as ρ 1.5 and ρ 3.6 , respectively.