Heat Transfer across Solid Contacts Enhanced with Nanomaterials

This presentation will describe thermal transport processes at solid-solid material interfaces. An overview of applications in the electronics industry will serve to motivate the subject, and then the basic diffusive constriction theory will be developed. The addition of carbon nanotube arrays to solid-solid interfaces has been shown to improve heat transfer significantly, and these materials will serve as an example of enhanced transport with nanomaterials. Experimental techniques and results will be reviewed, and a model that employs ballistic transport principles will be introduced to interpret these results.