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Nanoscale investigations show how roughness affects thermal transport across interfaces.
THE REMOVAL OF HEAT from a sliding interface is an important issue in tribology. Asperity-asperity contact can lead to locally high temperatures that influence additive reactions with surfaces and wear behavior. Surprisingly, though, the way in which heat moves across rough surfaces is remarkably poorly understood. Given that tribological contact occurs between micrometeror nanometer-scale asperities, these are actually the relevant scales on which to scrutinize heat transfer across an interface.
Contact depends crucially on the applied pressure, but experimentally, theoretically and philosophically, the issue of contact on a very small scale can become problematic, as we have previously discussed in this column [see "Contact Conundrum Conquered?" June 2009 Til available digitally at www.stle.org.)
Bernd Gotsmann and Mark Lantz from IBM Research-Zurich in Switzerland have looked at the problem of thermal transmission on the nanoscale by measuring and modeling...