Carbon nanocone: A promising thermal rectifier

Abstract

With molecular dynamics simulations, we demonstrate that the carbon nanocone is an excellent thermal rectifier. Obvious thermal rectification ratio in large temperature range, from 200K to 400K, has been observed. Furthermore, the rectification of nanocone does not depend on the length very sensitively, which is in stark contrast with the nanotube thermal rectifier in which the rectification decreases dramatically as the length increases.In nanocone, the heat flux is controlled by match/mismatch of the phonon power spectra.Our work demonstrates that carbon nanocone is a promising practical phononic device.

A review of thermal rectification observations and models in solid materials

“…This work by Wu and Li investigated the angle of the nanohorn, the tensile load applied to the nanohorn along the axis of transport and the temperature gradient applied to the nanohorn. In all cases the nanohorn exhibited a preferred direction of transport in the direction of decreasing radius (and also mass) which was similar to what has been seen in other nanotube and graphene studies [56,47,49,55]. Under no tensile loading the rectification was greater with a larger horn angle when the length of the horns were roughly equivalent.…”

“…Materials that have become extremely popular in addition to the carbon nanotube include asymmetric graphene sheets and carbon nanocones or nanohorns formed from graphene sheets [45,46,47,48,49].…”

Manipulating the temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity of graphene phononic crystal

“…[26,49,50] We use the velocity Verlet algorithm to integrate the differential equations of motions, where the time step, Δt, is set as 0.5 fs. NEMD simulations are performed as 30 ns in the calculations of dependence of thermal conductivity on temperature after the system reaches a steady state.…”

“…[15][16][17] Recently, there is a progress in managing phonons by nanostructured phononic crystals (PnCs) [18][19][20][21][22][23] which control heat by making use of phononic properties. It heralds the next technological revolution in phononics, such as thermal rectifiers, [15,[24][25][26][27][28][29] optomechanical crystals, [30,31] thermal cloaking, [32][33][34][35][36] thermoelectrics, [37][38][39][40][41] and thermocrystals. [18,21,22] When the characteristic size of nanostructured PnCs is closed to the wavelength of phonons, PnCs may manipulate the phonon band structures which lead to the phonon confinement.…”

Vibration and Elastic Buckling Analyses of Singlewalled Carbon Nanocones

“…CNCs are conical graphitic structures and have very promising mechanical, electrical and thermal properties [2][3][4][5][6][7]. Ge and Sattler [8] first proposed that five apex angles such as 19.2°, 38.9°, 60°, 86.6° and 123.6° can be used to distinguish CNCs .…”