Analytical model for the effects of wetting on thermal boundary conductance across solid/classical liquid interfaces

ME Caplan and A Giri and PE Hopkins, JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS, 140, 154701 (2014).

DOI: 10.1063/1.4870778

We develop an analytical model for the thermal boundary conductance between a solid and a liquid. By infusing recent developments in the phonon theory of liquid thermodynamics with diffuse mismatch theory, we derive a closed form model that can predict the effects of wetting on the thermal boundary conductance across an interface between a solid and a classical liquid. We account for the complete wetting (hydrophilicity), or lack thereof (hydrophobicity), of the liquid to the solid by considering varying contributions of transverse mode interactions between the solid and liquid interfacial layers; this transverse coupling relationship is determined with local density of states calculations from molecular dynamics simulations between Lennard- Jones solids and a liquids with different interfacial interaction energies. We present example calculations for the thermal boundary conductance between both hydrophobic and hydrophilic interfaces of Al/water and Au/water, which show excellent agreement with measured values reported by Ge et al. Z. Ge, D. G. Cahill, and P. V. Braun, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 186101 (2006). Our model does not require any fitting parameters and is appropriate to model heat flow across any planar interface between a solid and a classical liquid. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.

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