Experimental study on thermal contact resistance of multiwalled carbon nanotubes

Heat transfer at solid-solid interface is very fascinating where no one knows the full mechanism which has a huge impact in many applications in engineering and science. In many kinds of interfaces, we treat a van der Waals contact of perfectly-smooth surfaces by using multiwalled carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Their thermal contact resistance (TCR) is estimated by comparing measured thermal conductivity of CNT specimen and numerical simulation result. The TCR per unit area is estimated as 1.58∼3.33×10^-8 m ²K/W at room temperature in vacuum, which is much higher than our previous result in air. It was also found that TCR is inversely proportional with the temperature to the 1.92th power different from the simple phonon model represented by the diffuse mismatch model.