Thermal Transport across Polyethylene Chains

  • YANG Cong ,
  • DUAN Xuhui ,
  • ZHOU Jun ,
  • LIU Jun ,
  • LI Xiaobo
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  • 1. School of Energy and Power Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
    2. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh 27695, USA
    3. NNU-SULI Thermal Energy Research Center & Center for Quantum Transport and Thermal Energy Science, School of Physics and Technology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China

Online published: 2023-12-01

Supported by

The authors would like to acknowledge the support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 51776080).

Copyright

Science Press, Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, CAS and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022

Abstract

In polymers, heat could transfer efficiently along the long polymer chains; however due to the finite length of polymer chains, such heat eventually has to pass across the chain-chain boundary which is less effective in heat transfer. This paper investigated the thermal transport across polyethylene chains with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Thermal transport across two polymer chains overlapping with each other is studied with different chain length (75 nm, 150 nm and 251 nm) and chain-chain overlapping length. The results show that with increasing overlapping length, the total thermal conductance across the two chains exhibits maximum value, which is due to the increasing thermal resistance along the chains and the decreasing inter-chain thermal boundary resistance. Mathematically, we show that the total thermal resistance can be decomposed into two terms. The coupling term related to the inter-chain thermal resistance tends to saturate even with long overlapping length.

Cite this article

YANG Cong , DUAN Xuhui , ZHOU Jun , LIU Jun , LI Xiaobo . Thermal Transport across Polyethylene Chains[J]. Journal of Thermal Science, 2022 , 31(4) : 1061 -1067 . DOI: 10.1007/s11630-022-1640-7

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