Thermal rectification in Y-junction carbon nanotube bundle

A Aiyiti and ZW Zhang and BS Chen and SQ Hu and J Chen and XF Xu and BW Li, CARBON, 140, 673-679 (2018).

DOI: 10.1016/j.carbon.2018.09.002

Active control of heat flow is one of the important concepts in phononic devices, among which thermal diode is a fundamental building block. The long-standing bottleneck is the relevant experiments lagging far behind theoretical results. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrated considerable thermal rectification in the Y-junction carbon nanotube (CNT) bundle with suspended thermal bridge method. The thermal rectification ratio is up to -8.3%+/- 0.5% with a relatively low temperature difference (Delta T= 4K). Molecular dynamics simulation results show that asymmetric phonon transmission in different (forward and backward) directions is responsible for the thermal rectification observed in the asymmetric CNT structure. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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