Two-dimensional simulations of temperature fields of the reactor wall during hot-filament CVD diamond film growth over a large area

• Published in: Modelling and simulation in materials science and engineering Vol. 12; no. 2; pp. 325 - 335
• Main Authors: Wang, A Y, Sun, C, Cao, H T, Ji, A L, Huang, R F, Wen, L S
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing 01.03.2004
• ISSN: 0965-0393; 1361-651X
• DOI: 10.1088/0965-0393/12/2/012

High quality diamond films over a large area have been extensively studied for their excellent combination of physical properties, such as high hardness and thermal conductivity at room temperature, large band gap, good field emission properties and optical transparency at a wide range of wavelengths. In order to study the growth of diamond films over a large area in a traditional hot-filament chemical vapour deposition (HFCVD) reactor, two-dimensional mathematical models were first developed to investigate the temperature fields of the reactor walls, which made significant contributions to thermal round-flow of the reactant gases under different energy transfer systems. The set of partial differential equations involved in the thermal conduction system was solved with different boundary conditions by the finite control volume method. Numerical simulations showed that the temperature space distributions were heterogeneous when thermal radiation was assumed to be the only mechanism in heat transfer from the filaments to the reactor walls. However, taking into account the effects of thermal conduction under adiabatic and different isothermal temperature boundary conditions, the temperature uniformities improved greatly. In addition, thermal convection did not affect the temperature distributions but only increased the total temperature of the reactor wall. These results not only give insight into the dominant reasons resulting in low nucleation density and low growth rate of diamond films, but also provide a basis for the design of industrial HFCVD reactors to obtain high-quality diamond films over a large area.