Enhanced thermal conductance at the graphene-water interface based on functionalized alkane chains

Shuyu Chen; Ming Yang; Bin Liu; Min Xu; Teng Zhang; Bilin Zhuang; Ding Ding; Xiulan Huai; Hang Zhang

doi:10.1039/c8ra09879d

Enhanced thermal conductance at the graphene-water interface based on functionalized alkane chains

RSC Adv. 2019 Feb 6;9(8):4563-4570. doi: 10.1039/c8ra09879d. eCollection 2019 Jan 30.

Authors

Shuyu Chen^{1

2}, Ming Yang¹, Bin Liu¹, Min Xu¹, Teng Zhang³, Bilin Zhuang⁴, Ding Ding⁵, Xiulan Huai^{1

2}, Hang Zhang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190 China zhanghang@iet.cn.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100049 China.
³ Materials Science, Schrödinger New York NY 10035 USA zhteg4@gmail.com.
⁴ Institute of High Performance Computing, ASTAR Research Entities Singapore 138632.
⁵ Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, ASTAR Research Entities Singapore 138634 ding_ding@imre.a-star.edu.sg.

Abstract

Highly efficient thermal transport between graphene and water is crucial in applications such as microscopic heat dissipation, solar steam generation, sea-water desalination, and thermally conductive composites. However, a practical approach for enhancing thermal transport across graphene-water interfaces is lacking. We propose an effective and universal method to improve thermal-transport properties at the interface between multilayer graphene and water by a factor of ∼4 by grafting functionalized groups onto graphene. The most improved interfacial thermal conductance was 121.0 ± 11.4 MW m^-2 K^-1. This design is compatible with industrial processes. We also undertook molecular-level analyses to unveil the underlying mechanism for heat-transport enhancement. This study could provide new approaches for engineering heat transport across two-dimensional materials and water interfaces.