Temperature-Dependent Characteristics of Interfacial Thermal Resistance Between Liquid Metal Gallium and Nanofillers: A Molecular Dynamics Simulation Study
摘要
Liquid metal-based thermal interface materials have important applications in efficient thermal management under extreme high temperature conditions. However, one of the key challenges faced by such composites in practical applications is the insufficient wettability between the liquid metal and the solid filler, which leads to a significant increase in the interfacial thermal resistance, thus limiting their heat transfer efficiency. In this paper, based on the molecular dynamics simulation method, we systematically investigated the effects of temperature and solid-liquid bonding strength on the heat transfer law of the solid-liquid interface between liquid metal gallium and two solid materials (Diamond-Ga and Cu-Ga), as well as the wettability and morphology characteristics at the solid-liquid interface. In the simulations, the Tersoff potential function is used to describe the interactions between diamond atoms, the MEAM potential function is used to describe the interactions between gallium atoms and copper atoms, respectively, and the Lennard-Jones potential function is used to describe the interactions between different types of atoms. The results show that the thermal resistance of this LM-NF (Ga@NF) solid-liquid interface decreases with increasing system temperature, which is mainly attributed to the enhancement of inelastic phonon interfacial scattering and Umklapp scattering at high temperatures, where the gallium-loving interface has a weak dependence on the temperature change while the gallium-sparing interface exhibits a strong temperature dependence. In addition, the interfacial adsorption effect is significantly enhanced as the solid-liquid bonding strength gradually increases, which is the main reason why stronger solid-liquid interactions can effectively enhance the interfacial heat transfer.