Graphene Challenges Heat Conduction Laws for Extended Materials

R&D Magazine reported yesterday that according to scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and the National University of Singapore, graphene’s thermal conductivity diverges in relation to sample size. That “challenges the fundamental laws of heat conduction for extended materials.”

As quoted in the market news:

The French physicist Joseph Fourier had postulated the laws of heat propagation in solids. Accordingly, thermal conductivity is an intrinsic material property that is normally independent of size or shape. In graphene, a two-dimensional layer of carbon atoms, it is not the case, as our scientists now found out. With experiments and computer simulations, they found that the thermal conductivity logarithmically increases as a function of the size of the graphene samples: i.e., the longer the graphene patches, the more heat can be transferred per length unit.

Davide Donadio, head of a Max Planck Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, commented:

We recognized mechanisms of heat transfer that actually contradict Fourier’s law in the micrometer scale. Now all the previous experimental measurements of the thermal conductivity of graphene need to be reinterpreted. The very concept of thermal conductivity as an intrinsic property does not hold for graphene, at least for patches as large as several micrometers.

Click here to read the full R&D Magazine report.