Significantly enhanced polymer thermal conductivity by confining effect through bilayer MoS2 Surfaces
The present work refers to a simulation study on nanoconfined polymers in polymer-MoS 2 nanocomposites as a function of MoS 2 -MoS 2 interlayer separation. We indeed apply reverse nonequlibrium molecular dynamics simulations (RNEMD) to investigate thermal conductivity of polyamide oligomers which is confined by MoS 2 bilayers. The polymer thermal conductivity can be considerably enhanced when polymer chains are confined by MoS 2 sheets, in particular such behavior is more obvious for charged surfaces. The presence of the MoS 2 surfaces leads to well- ordering of polymer chains as well as denser packing which is an increase in {\lambda} in the polymer network via the use of MoS 2 surface confinement. Polymer chains elongation as well as their preferential alignment parallel to the MoS 2 surfaces indicates that {\lambda} in the polymer domain of the considered nanocomposites is larger than the one in the pure polymer phase. Additionally, our results of number of hydrogen bonds (HBs) in confined polymer chains suggest that a combined effect of the mentioned structural modification and enlarged values of HBs may cooperatively contribute to high polymer thermal conductivity facilitating phonon transport. Results reported here suggest a significant manner to design of confined polymer-MoS 2 composites for a wide variety range of applications.