How Wetting and Adhesion Affect Thermal Conductance of a Range of Hydrophobic to Hydrophilic Aqueous Interfaces

Abstract

We quantify the strength of interfacial thermal coupling at water-solid interfaces over a broad range of surface chemistries from hydrophobic to hydrophilic using molecular simulations. We show that the Kapitza conductance is proportional to the work of adhesion—a wetting property of that interface—enabling the use of thermal transport measurements as probes of the molecular environment and bonding at an interface. Excellent agreement with experiments on similar systems [Z. B. Ge et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 186101 (2006)] highlights the convergence of simulation and experiments on these complex nanoscopic systems.