10 Facts About Thermal conductivity

Thermal conductivity of a material is a measure of its ability to a particular material conduct heat.

For instance, metals typically have high thermal conductivity and are very efficient at conducting heat, while the opposite is true for insulating materials like Rockwool or Styrofoam.

Correspondingly, materials of high thermal conductivity are widely used in heat sink applications, and materials of low thermal conductivity are used as thermal insulation.

Dimension of thermal conductivity is MLTT, expressed in terms of the dimensions mass, length, time, and temperature.

In metals, thermal conductivity is approximately correlated with electrical conductivity according to the Wiedemann–Franz law, as freely moving valence electrons transfer not only electric current but heat energy.

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Influence of magnetic fields on thermal conductivity is known as the thermal Hall effect or Righi–Leduc effect.

Thermal conductivity is usually described by the Boltzmann equation with the relaxation time approximation in which phonon scattering is a limiting factor.

Mid and long wavelength phonons carry significant fraction of heat, so to further reduce lattice thermal conductivity one has to introduce structures to scatter these phonons.

Thermal conductivity depends continuously on quantities like temperature and material composition, it cannot be fully characterized by a finite number of experimental measurements.

Thermal conductivity can be computed using the Green-Kubo relations, which express transport coefficients in terms of the statistics of molecular trajectories.