Heat transfer between contacting surfaces is an important factor in the thermal behaviour of engineering components in turbomachinery and various other areas of technology. Thermal contact conductance (TCC) is a parameter that quantifies this heat flow. Any theoretical prediction of TCC should take into account the effects, if any, introduced by repeated loading and unloading. This study aims t...

Using molecular dynamics simulations with Tersoff reactive many-body potential for Si-Si, Si-C, and C-C interactions, we have calculated the thermal conductance at the interfaces between carbon nanotube (CNT) and silicon at different applied pressures. The interfaces are formed by axially compressing and indenting capped or uncapped CNTs against 2 x 1 reconstructed Si surfaces. The results show...

A model is developed in this work to predict the thermal contact resistance of carbon nanotube (CNT) array interfaces with CNT arrays synthesized directly on substrate surfaces. An analytical model for contact mechanics is first developed in conjunction with prior data from load–displacement experiments to predict the real contact area established in CNT array interfaces as a function of applie...

-A linear perturbation method is used to examine the stability of a unidirectional solidification problem in which a liquid, initially at the melting temperature, becomes solidified by heat transfer across a pressure-dependent thermal contact resistance to a plane mold. The contact pressure will be influenced by thermal distortion in response to the instantaneous temperature field in the solidi...

Most surface properties used in the calculation of contact conductance are not intrinsic to the surface, but vary with the sampling frequency of the instrument used to characterize the surface. This paper offers a methodology for characterizing a surface based on intrinsic surface characterization properties (the self-affine fractal dimension and topothesy), intrinsic material properties, and a...

We demonstrate that in the atomic-scale limit the thermal conductance K of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) model and its variants strongly deviates from the mesoscopic behavior due to the relevance of contact resistance. As a result, atomic chains follow log K=nu log T, where the power-law coefficient nu is exactly two times larger than the mesoscopic value. We smoothly interconnect the atomic and m...

We show that in a finite one-dimensional (1D) system with diffusive thermal transport described by the Fourier's law, negative differential thermal conductance (NDTC) cannot occur when the temperature at one end is fixed and there are no abrupt junctions. We demonstrate that NDTC in this case requires the presence of junction(s) with temperature-dependent thermal contact resistance (TCR). We de...