Negative differential thermal resistance effect in a nanoscale sandwiched system with nanostructured surfaces

HY Li and J Wang and GD Xia, INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS IN HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER, 142, 106605 (2023).

DOI: 10.1016/j.icheatmasstransfer.2022.106605

In this work, the negative differential thermal resistance effect has been proposed in a solid-liquid-solid sand-wiched system with a nanostructured cold surface. Non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations demon-strate that the heat flux in the present sandwiched system increases with the temperature bias for low temperature bias, while for high temperature bias, the heat flux decreases counter- intuitively with increasing temperature bias. Based on the analysis of the interfacial thermal resistance and the density depletion length at the solid-liquid interface, the negative differential thermal resistance effect at high temperature bias is attributed to the suppressed solid- liquid interfacial thermal conductance with decreasing temperature. In addition, it is found that the negative differential thermal resistance effect can be tuned by the size of the nanostructure.

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