This study examines the influence of radial thickness on the thermal conductivity of thin metallic wires. While size effects on the electrical conductivity of thin wires have been discussed in the literature, research into size effects on thermal conductivity still requires investigation. At such small length scales, the assumption that the reduced electrical conductivity can be simply related ...

This paper presents detailed numerical simulations predicting the effective thermal conductivity of spherical monodisperse and polydisperse core–shell particles ordered or randomly distributed in a continuous matrix. First, the effective thermal conductivity of this three-component composite material was found to be independent of the capsule spatial distribution and size distribution. In fact,...

Using effective medium theory the authors demonstrate that the thermal conductivity of nanofluids can be significantly enhanced by the aggregation of nanoparticles into clusters. Predictions of the effective medium theory are in excellent agreement with detailed numerical calculation on model nanofluids involving fractal clusters and show the importance of cluster morphology on thermal conducti...

Molecular dynamics simulations of thermal conduction in nanoporous thin films are performed. Thermal conductivity displays an inverse temperature dependence for films with small pores and a much less pronounced dependence for larger pores. Increasing porosity reduces thermal conductivity, while pore shape has little effect except in the most anisotropic cases. The pores separate the film into l...

The aim of this work is to determine the thermal conductivity of mesoporous silicon (PoSi) by fitting the experimental results with simulated ones. The electrothermal response (resistance versus applied current) of differently designed test lines integrated onto PoSi/silicon substrates and the bulk were compared to the simulations. The PoSi thermal conductivity was the single parameter used to ...

Beryllium, in its pebble form, has been proposed in various blanket concepts to serve different purposes. Thermal property data for such a heterogeneous packed bed is needed, particularly data on the impact of compression forces on its magnitude and consequent temperature profile. The objectives of this work are to obtain and quantify experimental data on the effective thermal conductivity of a...

The extremely high thermal conductivity of individual carbon nanotubes, predicted theoretically and observed experimentally, has not yet been achieved for large nanotube assemblies. Resistances at tube-tube interconnections and tube-electrode interfaces have been considered the main obstacles for effective electronic and heat transport. Here we show that, even for infinitely long and perfect na...

A model has been established for the effective thermal conductivity of a bulk polycrystal made of randomly oriented superlattice grains with anisotropic thermal conductivity. The in-plane and cross-plane thermal conductivities of each superlattice grain are combined using an analytical averaging rule that is verified using finite element methods. The superlattice conductivities are calculated u...

A critical synthesis of the variants within the thermophysical properties of nanofluids is presented in this work. The experimental results for the effective thermal conductivity and viscosity reported by several authors are in disagreement. Theoretical and experimental studies are essential to clarify the discrepancies in the results and in proper understanding of heat transfer enhancement cha...