The contact area dependent interfacial thermal conductance

Abstract

The effects of the contact area on the interfacial thermal conductance σ are investigated using the atomic Green’s function method. Different from the prediction of the heat diffusion transport model, we obtain an interesting result that the interfacial thermal conductance per unit area Λ is positively dependent on the contact area as the area varies from a few atoms to several square nanometers. Through calculating the phonon transmission function, it is uncovered that the phonon transmission per unit area increases with the increased contact area. This is attributed to that each atom has more neighboring atoms in the counterpart of the interface with the increased contact area, which provides more channels for phonon transport.