  Prediction of lattice thermal conductivity is important to many applications
and technologies, especially for high-throughput materials screening. However,
the state-of-the-art method based on three-phonon scattering process is bound
with high computational cost while semi-empirical models such as the Slack
equation are less accurate. In this work, we examined the theoretical
background of the commonly-used computational models for high-throughput
thermal conductivity prediction and proposed an efficient and accurate method
based on an approximation for three-phonon scattering strength. This
quasi-harmonic approximation has comparable computational cost with many
widely-used thermal conductivity models but had the best performance in regard
to quantitative accuracy. As compared to many models that can only predict
lattice thermal conductivity values, this model also allows to include Normal
processes and obtain the phonon relaxation time.
