“…Furthermore, since the topography of these features can undergo significant changes, the influence of contact area and self-contact (where portions of the MMT-TIM structure come into contact with other initially noncontacting parts) during compression on the effective thermal resistance and thermal conductivity of the MMT-TIMs must also be characterized, A commercial finite element (FE) package called DEFORM (Scientific Forming Technologies Corporation) was used to simultaneously model the large plastic defoimations as well as the bulk thermal response of the MMT-TIMs as they undergo large topographic changes during compression. This package was designed for modeling high-strain operations such as forging, rolling, and extrusion and thus is well suited towards modeling the large plastic deformations inherent to this study [12][13][14], While an entire MMT-TIM may consist of an array of many features, here the numerical model simulated a unit-cell consisting of a single MMT-TIM feature with the appropriate boundary conditions, A representation of a MMT-TIM unit-cell bounded by the two contacting bodies is shown in Fig, 2,…”