Thermal transport engineering in single layered graphene sheets via MD simulations: On the effect of nickel coating

Abstract

Abstract The main aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of the coating layer on the thermal properties of Ni-coated graphene sheets. In this regard, non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations have been carried out to provide detailed information on the thermal properties of Ni-coated graphene sheets. It has been observed that with increasing coating ratio to 0.5 % , the thermal conductivity reduces to only about 60 % of the corresponding value for the pristine graphene. However, by increasing the coating ratio, thermal conductivity converged to an asymptotic value at the coating ratio equals to 2 % . Keeping this coating percentage fixed, nickel atoms are also distributed on the graphene sheet in different patterns such as random half-side coating, spectral, agglomerated, checkered and strips. It is revealed that by using different nickel coating patterns, thermal properties of the pristine graphene can be highly tunable.