Carbon Nanocone: A Promising Thermal Rectifier

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that carbon nanocones exhibit significant thermal rectification over a wide temperature range, with rectification properties that are relatively insensitive to length, making them promising for phononic device applications.

Contribution

The study reveals that carbon nanocones can serve as effective thermal rectifiers with stable performance across different lengths, unlike nanotubes.

Findings

Significant thermal rectification observed from 200 to 400 K.

Rectification in nanocones is insensitive to length variations.

Carbon nanocones outperform nanotubes as thermal rectifiers.

Abstract

With molecular dynamics simulations, we demonstrate very obvious thermal rectification in large temperature range from 200 to 400 K in nanocone. We also observe that the rectification of nanocone does not depend on the length very sensitively, which is in stark contrast with the nanotube thermal rectifier in which the rectification decreases dramatically as the length increases. Our work demonstrates that carbon nanocone is a promising practical phononic device.