Interface Thermal Resistance between Liquid Water and Various Metallic Surfaces

TQ Vo and B Kim, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRECISION ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING, 16, 1341-1346 (2015).

DOI: 10.1007/s12541-015-0176-0

Enhancing thermal transport mechanisms in nanostructures and nanomaterials are important factors for their use in green renewable energy applications. The behaviors and reliability of nanoscale devices strongly depend on the way the systems dissipate heat. Therefore, using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we investigated the interface thermal resistance between liquid water and various metallic surfaces in nanochannels. Solid-liquid interface thermal resistance is well known as the Kapitza length. In this study, we model heat transfer through two parallel solid walls separated by liquid water, holding each solid wall at a different temperature to impose a temperature gradient. Silicon with a diamond crystal lattice structure and copper; silver; gold, and platinum with face-centered cubic (FCC) crystal lattice structure were chosen as the solid materials due to their extensive applications in nanotechnology. Temperature jumps at such solid-liquid interfaces are due to thermal transport between the dissimilar materials, resulting in an interface thermal resistance. We observed the behaviors of liquid water molecules in the vicinity of the metallic surfaces, revealing that the Kapitza length varies as a function of solid-liquid interaction strength, and confirming the effect of Lennard- Jones (LJ) interaction added to long-range Coulombic interaction in the liquid model, and using liquid water instead of simple LJ liquid.

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