Mass and stiffness effects on thermal resistance at the solid-liquid interface of nanofluidic channels

This paper investigates the effects of the wall mass, m_w, and bonding stiffness, κ on the thermal resistance at a solid-liquid interface. The main observation is that the mass influences the thermal resistance independently of its effects on the theoretical harmonic frequency, √κ /m_w of the walls. We show that increasing the atomic mass of the solid particles significantly increases the temperature jump at the interface. Furthermore, this effect becomes continuously more important as the value of the bonding stiffness decreases. To understand this, we study the density profiles of the walls, which shed light on their oscillatory motion. Finally, we show that the thermal resistance behaves as a fifth order polynomial of log(m_wκ)