Thermal Resistance of Nanowire-Plane Interfaces

This paper employs continuum principles combined with van der Waals theory to estimate the thermal contact resistance between nanowires and planar substrates. This resistance is modeled using elastic deformation theory and thermal resistance relations. The contact force between a nanowire and substrate is obtained through a calculation of the van der Waals interaction energy between the two. The model estimates numerical values of constriction and gap resistances for several nanowire-substrate combinations with water and air as the surrounding media. The total interface resistance is almost equal to the gap resistance when the surrounding medium has a high thermal conductivity. For a low-conductivity medium, the interface resistance is dominated by the constriction resistance, which itself depends significantly on nanowire and substrate conductivities. A trend observed in all calculations is that the interface resistance increases with smaller nanowires, showing that interface resistance will be a significant parameter in the design and performance of nanoelectronic devices.