Steady heat conduction-based thermal conductivity measurement of single walled carbon nanotubes thin film using a micropipette thermal sensor

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the thermal conductivity measurement of single-walled carbon nanotubes thin film using a laser point source-based steady state heat conduction method. A high precision micropipette thermal sensor fabricated with a sensing tip size varying from 2 mu m to 5 mu m and capable of measuring thermal fluctuation with resolution of +/- 0.01 K was used to measure the temperature gradient across the suspended carbon nanotubes (CNT) film with a thickness of 100 nm. We used a steady heat conduction model to correlate the temperature gradient to the thermal conductivity of the film. We measured the average thermal conductivity of CNT film as 74.3 +/- 7.9 W m (1) K (1) at room temperature. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4792841]