Contact thermal resistance between individual multiwall carbon nanotubes

Abstract

We report on experimental measurements of contact thermal resistance between individual carbon nanotubes. Results indicate that the contact thermal conductance can increase by nearly two orders of magnitude (from 10−8 to 10−6 W/K) as the contact area increases from a cross contact to an aligned contact. Normalization with respect to the contact area leads to normalized contact thermal resistance on the order of 10−9 m2 K/W at room temperature, one order of magnitude lower than that from a molecular dynamics simulation in literature. These results should have important implications in the design of carbon nanotube-polymer composites for tunable thermal properties.