THERMAL TRANSPORT ACROSS CARBON NANOTUBE CONNECTED BY MOLECULAR LINKERS

J Liu and M Alhashme and RG Yang, PROCEEDINGS OF THE ASME INTERNATIONAL MECHANICAL ENGINEERING CONGRESS AND EXPOSITION, 2011, VOL 10, PTS A AND B, 395-396 (2012).

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been reported to have excellent thermal and mechanical properties over the past two decades. However, the practical application of CNT-based technologies has been limited, due to the inability to transform the excellent properties of single CNTs into macroscopic applications. CNT network structure connects CNTs and can be possibly scaled up to macro-scale CNT-based application. In this paper, nonequilibrium molecular dynamics is applied to investigate thermal transport across two CNTs connected longitudinally by molecular linkers. We show the effect of different types and lengths of molecular linkers on interfacial thermal conductance. We also analyze the density of vibrational normal modes to further understand the interfacial thermal conductance between different molecular linkers and CNTs. These results provide guidance for choosing molecular linkers to build up large-scale CNT-based network structures.

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