Revealing the in-plane thermal transport disparities between single- walled circular and collapsed carbon nanotubes

HS Qin and MD Yu and XR Jing and WW Jiang, JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS, 137, 144304 (2025).

DOI: 10.1063/5.0260103

In this work, we investigate the in-plane thermal transport disparities between single-walled circular and collapsed carbon nanotubes (CNTs), with a focus on temperature effects and Stone-Wales (SW) defects. Using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations, we reveal that collapsed CNTs exhibit significantly lower thermal conductivity than circular CNTs due to enhanced phonon scattering and thermal disturbances. A dominoes- like reversible transformation is observed in collapsed CNTs at high temperatures (>800 K), while high SW defect densities (>4.0%) induce an irreversible transformation into circular configurations for smaller- diameter collapsed CNTs. Thermal conductivity decreases with increasing temperature and SW density, particularly in smaller-diameter collapsed CNTs with reduced van der Waals adhesion and enhanced phonon-phonon scattering. These findings provide insights into tunable thermal transport in CNTs, offering potential applications in thermoelectric devices and nanoscale thermal management.

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