Interfacial thermal conductance of buckling carbon nanotubes

Bond transition of sp² to sp³ in carbon nanotube can be realized through bending operation at buckling location, which affects the electronic, mechanical and thermal properties of buckled carbon nanotube. In this work, thermal properties of buckled tri-walled carbon nanotube with sp³ bonds are explored using molecular dynamics. Our results reveal that interfacial thermal conductance at buckling location is sensitive to the bending angle, which decreases exponentially with increasing bending angle until 90 degree because of increasing the number of interlayer sp³ bonds. When the bending angle is beyond 90 degree, there are sp³ bonds formed on the outer-tube walls which provide new paths for heat transfer. The insight of mechanism of thermal properties is analyzed by determining atomic micro-heat flux scattering. Our findings provide a flexible and applicable method to design thermal management device. This unusual phenomenon is explained by the micro-heat flux migration and stress distributions.