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Advances in Mechanical Engineering
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 692842, 7 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/692842
Understanding of Thermal Conductance of Thin Gas Layers
Department of Engineering Mechanics and CNMM, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Received 5 November 2012; Revised 12 December 2012; Accepted 13 December 2012
Academic Editor: Shuyu Sun
Copyright © 2013 Xiaodong Shan and Moran Wang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
We studied heat conductions in a thin gas layer at micro- and nanoscales between two straight walls by atomistic modeling. Since the Knudsen number is high while the gas may be not really rarefied, we use the generalized Enskog-Monte-Carlo method (GEMC) for simulations. The thermal conductivity of thin gas layer is reduced significantly with the decreased thickness of gas layer. We examined a few possible causes including the rarefied gas effect and the thermal inertia effect. Our careful simulations indicate that the temperature jump on wall surfaces and the properties changing significantly by the confined space are two dominating factors to the thermal conductivity reduction of thin gas layers.