Notebooks and codes for the course Thermal Modeling: From Semiconductor to Medical Devices and Personalized Therapy Planning, FS2020 @ETHZ

The course introduces computational techniques to model electromagnetic heating across many orders of magnitudes, from the atomic to the macroscopic scale. Both desired and undesired thermal effects will be covered, e.g. thermal cancer therapies based on tissue heating or Joule heating in semiconductor devices. A wide range of simulation approaches and numerical methods will be introduced.

During this course the students will:

• learn the physics governing and computational models describing electromagnetic-induced heating;

• get familiar with computational simulation techniques across a wide range of spatial scales, incl. methods to simulate in vivo heating, considering thermoregulation and perfusion, or quantum mechanical approaches considering heat at the level of atomic vibrations;

• implement and apply simulation techniques within a state-of-the-art open-source simulation platform for computational life sciences, as well as a framework for computer-aided design of semiconductor devices;

• learn about remaining challenges in this field

The following topics will be discussed during the semester:

• Introduction about electromagnetic heating (from its historical perspective to its application in biology);

• Microscopic/Macroscopic thermal transport (governing equations, numerical methods, examples);

• Numerical algorithms and their implementation in python and/or C++, parallelisation approaches, and high performance computing solutions;

• Practical examples: thermal therapy planning with Sim4Life and technology computer aided design with OMEN;

• Model verification and validation.