At the same time, the smaller diameter nanotubes have large strains due to increased curvature in contrast to the large diameter nanotubes. This particular strain effect can also explain the differences in thermal conductivity of small diameter nanotube and planar graphite. The effects of the structural defects in 1-dimensional systems are also studied. It is now widely accepted that the thermal management in nanosize devices becomes increasingly important as the size of the device reduces. Their remarkable properties, such as great strength, light weight, special electronic structures, and high stability, make carbon nanotubes the ideal material for a wide range of applications.
Carbon nanotubes has very unique electronic properties.
A lot of experiments and theoretical investigations have focused on electronic structures of carbon nanotubes in order to understand the origin of the remarkable phenomena. In addition, large effort has been given to characterize their mechanical properties, such as Young's modulus, energetics, etc. To date, there is little progress made to characterize and to understand the thermal conduction in nanoscale materials. The purpose of our work is first to understand the lattice thermal transport properties for carbon nanotubes. Due to technological difficulties of synthesizing large quantity, high quality, and well ordered nanotubes, it is still challenging to perform experiments on thermal conduction measurements.