Tingyu Lu
Center for Phononics and Thermal Energy Science; China-EU Joint Lab on Nanophononics; Shanghai Key Laboratory of Special Artificial Microstructure Materials and Technology, School of Physics Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, People's Republic of China; Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, USA
Kyunghoon Kim
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, USA
Xiaobo Li
Key Laboratory of Coal Combustion, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan 430074, P. R. China; Nano Interface Center for Energy(NICE), School of Energy and Power Engineering, Huazhong University
of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan 430074, P. R. China
Jun Zhou
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, The Behrend College 5101 Jordan Road, Erie, PA 16506, USA; Center for Phononics and Thermal Energy Science; China-EU Joint Lab on Nanophononics; Shanghai Key Laboratory of Special Artificial Microstructure Materials and Technology, School of Physics Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, People’s Republic of China
Gang Chen
Mechanical Engineering Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Jun Liu
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, USA
The potential to achieve high-thermal-conductivity polymers by aligning their molecular chains makes polymers attractive for heat transfer applications. Due to their quasi-one-dimensional structural nature, the understanding on the thermal transport in those ultra-drawn semicrystalline polymer fibers or films is still lacking. In this paper, we built the ideal repeating units of semicrystalline polyethylene and studied their dependence of thermal conductivity on different crystallinity and interlamellar topology using the molecular dynamics simulations. We found that the conventional models, such as the Choy-Young's model, the series model, and Takayanagi's model, cannot accurately predict the thermal conductivity of the quasi-one-dimensional semicrystalline polyethylene. A modified Takayanagi's model was proposed to explain the dependence of thermal conductivity on the bridge number at intermediate and high crystallinity.