How Wetting and Adhesion Affect Thermal Conductance of a Range of Hydrophobic to Hydrophilic Aqueous Interfaces

We quantify the strength of interfacial thermal coupling at water-solid interfaces over a broad range of surface chemistries from hydrophobic to hydrophilic using molecular simulations. We show that the Kapitza conductance is proportional to the work of adhesion-a wetting property of that interface-enabling the use of thermal transport measurements as probes of the molecular environment and bonding at an interface. Excellent agreement with experiments on similar systems [Z. B. Ge, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 186101 (2006)10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.186101] highlights the convergence of simulation and experiments on these complex nanoscopic systems.