Size effects on thermal rectification in mass-graded anharmonic lattices

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the size and mass gradient in one-dimensional anharmonic lattices affect thermal rectification efficiency, revealing that larger systems with scaled gradients show significantly increased rectification due to temperature profile asymmetry.

Contribution

It demonstrates that scaling the mass gradient with system size enhances thermal rectification in mass-graded anharmonic lattices, highlighting the role of temperature profile asymmetry.

Findings

Rectification modestly increases with system size.

Scaling mass gradient with size significantly boosts rectification.

Asymmetry in temperature profiles underpins the rectification enhancement.

Abstract

In this work we study the thermal rectification efficiency of a one-dimensional mass-graded anharmonic oscillator lattice at large system sizes. A modest increase in rectification is observed. When the magnitude of the mass gradient scales with the system size, the aforementioned effect increases substantially. This result can be unmistakeably attributed to an asymmetry in the local temperature profile obtained for the employed parameter values.