A Novel Solid-State Thermal Rectifier Based On Reduced Graphene Oxide

TLDR

Phononic devices that manipulate heat transport have attracted attention, with potential applications in renewable energy and theoretical proposals for elementary devices such as diodes, transistors, and logic elements. The study aims to experimentally create a macroscopic thermal rectifier using reduced graphene oxide. The authors fabricated a macroscopic thermal rectifier from reduced graphene oxide and evaluated its rectification behavior. The rectifier exhibited a thermal rectification ratio of 1.21 under a 12 K temperature bias, which increased with greater asymmetry, demonstrating the feasibility of large‑area graphene‑based phononic devices for thermal management.

Abstract

Recently, manipulating heat transport by phononic devices has received significant attention, in which phonon – a heat pulse through lattice, is used to carry energy. In addition to heat control, the thermal devices might also have broad applications in the renewable energy engineering, such as thermoelectric energy harvesting. Elementary phononic devices such as diode, transistor and logic devices have been theoretically proposed. In this work, we experimentally create a macroscopic scale thermal rectifier based on reduced graphene oxide. Obvious thermal rectification ratio up to 1.21 under 12 K temperature bias has been observed. Moreover, this ratio can be enhanced further by increasing the asymmetric ratio. Collectively, our results raise the exciting prospect that the realization of macroscopic phononic device with large-area graphene based materials is technologically feasible, which may open up important applications in thermal circuits and thermal management.