The effective thermal conductivity of composite materials with thermal contactresistance at interfaces is studied by lattice Boltzmann modeling in this work.We modified the non-dimensional partial bounce-back scheme, proposed by Han etal. [Int. J. Thermal Sci., 2008. 47: 1276-1283],to introduce a real thermal contact resistance at interfaces into the thermallattice Boltzmann framework by re-deriving the redistribution function of heatat the phase interfaces for a corrected dimensional formulation. The modifiedscheme was validated in several cases with good agreement between the simulationresults and the corresponding theoretical solutions. Furthermore, we predictedthe effective thermal conductivities of composite materials using this methodwhere the contact thermal resistance was not negligible, and revealed theeffects of particle volume fraction, thermal contact resistance and particlesize. The results in this study may provide a useful support for materialsdesign and structure optimization.

Density functional theory combined with the Grüneisen approximation is used to calculate the thermal properties of single-walled boron nanotubes (BNTs). The specific heat and thermal expansion are investigated. The thermal expansion coefficient of the BNT is found to be significantly correlated with tube size and chirality. A remarkable thermal contraction is found at small tube diameters. These results indicate that BNTs would have potential applications in sensors, actuators, and memory materials.