Abstract: The growth cycle of tellurium zinc cadmium crystals is long and the growth system is complex. When using vertical Bridgman or vertical gradient freezing methods to grow tellurium zinc cadmium (CdZnTe) crystal materials, the growth process is often difficult to observe intuitively, and there is no corresponding means to detect the temperature field inside the crystals, which brings inconvenience to improve the crystal growth process. In this paper, numerical simulation software is used to analyze the influences of furnace air convection on the temperature field of CdZnTe crystal growth. By opening holes at the top and bottom of furnace, gas exchanging occurs between the inside and outside of the furnace, thereby regulates the convection behaviors. Before opening holes, the convection rate is slow (only 10^-5 m/s), forming stable convection cells; after opening holes, the convection rate significantly increases (0.25~0.90 m/s), and the convection state changes to laminar flow. Through controlling the aperture size (20~40 mm) in the model, the laminar flow rate can be effectively regulated. At the same temperature setting, when the flow rate increases from 0.25 m/s to 0.90 m/s, the temperature gradient will increase from 0.5 K/mm to 1.1 K/mm. Furthermore, experimental work is applied on real furnace, the change of temperature filed before and after opening holes were studied. The experimental results of temperature gradient is accord with the simulating results. It is also found that under laminar flow state, increasing convection rate may improve the stability of temperature field. The increase of temperature gradient and the improvement of stability in the temperature field will be beneficial for the preparation of high-quality CdZnTe crystals.

Key words: CdZnTe, crystal growth, convection, temperature field, CGSim software simulation