Volume 16: Low Carbon Cities and Urban Energy Systems: Part V

The Optimal Solution to Increase Across-Tube Heat Transfer Channel Through Polyethylene Bridge Lin Qiu, Fengcheng Li, Ning Zhu, Yanhui Feng, Xinxin Zhang, Xiaohua Zhang

Abstract

The enormous interfacial thermal resistance between adjacent CNT leads to a significant weakening of the overall thermal conductivity of the CNT-assembled materials. In this study, based on the parallel CNT interfaces of natural van der Waals interaction, a unique scheme was proposed to enhance the interfacial thermal transport properties. The initial arrangement of polyethylene (PE) chains with linear configuration was oriental controlled and loaded to both sides of parallel CNT interfaces. The results show that the arrangement angle between PE and CNT axis has a key influence on the interfacial thermal conductance, which is conducive to the increase of effective heat transfer area between parallel CNT interfaces, and an abundant low-frequency phonon vibration mode is excited at the interfaces, so as to achieve the significant improvement of the thermal transport properties between parallel CNT interfaces (up to 120%).

Keywords Carbon nanotube, Interfacial thermal transport, Polyethylene, Bridging effect