Relative importance of grain boundaries and size effects in thermal conductivity of nanocrystalline materials

A theoretical model for describing effective thermal conductivity (ETC) of nanocrystalline materials has been proposed, so that the ETC can be easily obtained from its grain size, single crystal thermal conductivity, single crystal phonon mean free path (PMFP) and the Kaptiza thermal resistance. In addition, the relative importance between grain boundaries (GBs) and size effects on the ETC of nanocrystalline diamond at 300 K has been studied. It has been demonstrated that with increasing grain size, both GBs and size effects become weaker, while size effects become stronger on thermal conductivity than GBs effects.