Reducing thermal contact resistance using nanocoating

Thermal contact resistance (TCR) between solid and solid is a very important phenomenon in many application fields including power generation, refrigeration systems, air conditioning, manufacturing, aerospace etc. The purpose of this paper is to understand and quantify the effect of the aluminum nanocoating on the TCR. Due to the complex mechanism of heat transfer in the contact surface, measurement and calculation of the TCR in contacting surface have many difficulties and problems. The purpose of this study is the development of a new experimental tool and numerical method for estimation of TCR and the reduction of TCR by nanocoating. Therefore, the TCR between two specimens is estimated with conjugate gradient method with adjoint problem for function estimation as one of the efficient and effective methods. Results show that an excellent estimation of the thermal contact resistance can be obtained with this method and the aluminum nanocoating reduces the TCR significantly. •The purpose of this paper is to quantify the effect of nanocoating on the TCR.•The TCR between two specimens is estimated with CGM.•The results showed that the value of the TCR decreases about 38%, after nanocoating.