A material with anisotropic
heat conduction characteristics, which
is determined by molecular scale structure, provides a way of controlling
heat flow in nanoscale spaces. As such, here, we consider layer-by-layer
(LbL) membranes, which are an electrostatic assembly of polyelectrolyte
multilayers and are expected to have different heat conduction characteristics
between cross-plane and in-plane directions. We constructed models
of a poly(acrylic acid)/polyethylenimine (PAA/PEI) LbL membrane sandwiched
by charged solid walls and investigated their anisotropic heat conduction
using molecular dynamics simulations. In the cross-plane direction,
the thermal boundary resistance between the solid wall and the LbL
membrane and that between the constituent PAA and PEI layers decrease
with increasing degree of ionization (solid surface charge density
and the number of electric charges per PAA/PEI molecule). When the
degree of ionization is low, the cross-plane thermal conductivity
of a constituent layer is higher than that of the bulk state. As the
degree of ionization increases, however, the cross-plane thermal conductivity
of PAA, a linear polymer, decreases because of the increase in the
number of in-plane oriented polymer chains. In the in-plane direction,
we investigated the heat conduction of each layer and found the enhancement
of effective in-plane thermal conductivity again due to the in-plane
oriented chain alignment. The heat conduction in the LbL membrane
is three-dimensionally enhanced compared to those in the bulk states
of the constituent polymers because of the electrostatic interactions
in the cross-plane direction and the molecular alignment in the in-plane
direction.