Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is probably the most widely used process for producing thin solid films from gaseous reactants. Film deposition and its characteristics such as deposition rate, thickness and non-uniformity, is influenced by the combined effect of chemical reactions and transport phenomena. In this work it is shown that for various operating conditions of the CVD reactors the resulting flow field is counter-intuitive, i.e. non-axisymmetric flow patterns may develop in a perfectly symmetric reactor setup. This is due to the inherent nonlinearity that results from the competition of physical mechanisms that co-exist inside the reactor. A computational framework which “wraps” around a commercial, “black box”-type CFD code is used in order to investigate the existence of non-axisymmetric states in an (axi-)symmetric reactor setup. The existence of such states are studied in conjunction with the characteristics of the end product, the film.

Computational fluid dynamics, chemical vapor deposition, nonlinear, phenomena, multiplicity