Influence of perturbative intertube interactions on ballistic and quasi-ballistic phonon transports in double-walled carbon nanotubes

Abstract

Assembling single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) into multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) reduces the intrinsically high thermal conductivity of individual SWCNTs. Typically, this reduction can be explained by structural imperfections, e.g., defects, and van der Waals (vdW) intertube interactions between the constituent SWCNTs are considered to have negligible impacts on the reduction. However, intertube interactions should alter the transport characteristics of low-frequency phonons responsible for heat conduction, which implies that intertube interactions may also reduce the thermal conductivity of MWCNTs when low-frequency phonons modulated by intertube interactions participate in the overall heat conduction. In this study, by applying a combination of the atomistic Green's function method and nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulation to double-walled carbon nanotubes (DWCNT) with different chiral configurations of SWCNTs and various lengths, we investigated the length scale and chiral configuration where perturbative intertube interactions can suppress phonon transports. We found that thermal resistance attributed to intertube interactions manifests in the low-temperature ballistic regime and quasi-ballistic regime for DWCNT lengths greater than 1 μm. Revisiting the influence of the intertube interactions helps comprehend the intrinsic origin of the reduced thermal conductivity of MWCNTs. In addition, the reported findings are beneficial for the thermal engineering of SWCNT-assembled materials, including emerging one-dimensional vdW heterostructures.