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

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.

Tunable Mechanical and Thermal Properties of One-Dimensional Carbyne Chain: Phase Transition and Microscopic Dynamics

“…77,78 Recently, a graphene-based thermal modulator is predicted theoretically, in which the heat flux is controlled by applying a tunable external pressure. 79 On the other hand, temperature-induced change in thermal conductivity is important for application in thermal memory.…”

Thermal rectification in silicon by a graded distribution of defects

“…Interestingly enough, rectifications as small as 3%-4% have been indeed measured in the Si-based systems; 14 an even smaller rectification of about 1%-2% has been experimentally reported, although in a rather different system as reduced graphene oxide. 18 So, the rectification values predicted in this work should be within the experimental capability of measure. Varying the profile of the defect distribution is an effective way to control the resulting R, and the present simulations suggest that the exponential profile turns out to be the most efficient in generating different values for jJ fwd j and jJ rev j.…”

“…This basically requires that such a sharp interface is not present in the rectifying device. In this regard, low-dimensional systems (either model or realistic) prompt several possible rectifying configurations, such as non-uniform mass loading, suited distributions of defects, and tailored shaping, [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]33 where the above combination is actually realized. In this work, we further exploit this concept in bulk-like systems.…”

Graphene-based thermal modulators

“…With the theoretical predictions [1,2] and experimental realization [3,4] of a thermal rectifier, the concept of phononics [5] has received significant attention [6−8]. It should be noted that although electronic modulators and photonic modulators have been widely used, their thermal counterpart-a thermal modulator-has not been well studied.…”