Modeling of thermal conductivity for disordered carbon nanotube networks

Abstract

Several theoretical models have been developed so far to predict the thermal conductivities of carbon nanotube (CNT) networks. However, these models overestimated the thermal conductivity significantly. In this paper, we claimed that a CNT network can be considered as a contact thermal resistance network. In the contact thermal resistance network, the temperature of an individual CNT is nonuniform and the intrinsic thermal resistance of CNTs can be ignored. Compared with the previous models, the model we proposed agrees well with the experimental results of single-walled CNT networks.