Thermal Diodes: Giant Thermal Rectification from Polyethylene Nanofiber Thermal Diodes (Small 36/2015)

Thermal rectification has been identified as a key to realizing phononic computing and to resolving the ever-growing heat dissipation problem in microelectronics. The development of these applications, however, are held hostage by the lack of high-performance thermal rectifiers. Through theoretical analysis and molecular dynamics simulations, T. Zhang and T. Luo propose a thermal diode making use of the phase-dependent thermal conductivity of polyethylene nanofibers. On page 4657, this leads to unprecedented thermal rectification factors (as large as 1.20) with only a small temperature bias (<20 °C) needed.