Geopolymer has been considered as
a green and low-carbon
material
with great potential application due to its simple synthesis process,
environmental protection, excellent mechanical properties, good chemical
resistance, and durability. In this work, the molecular dynamics simulation
is employed to investigate the effect of the size, content, and distribution
of carbon nanotubes on the thermal conductivity of geopolymer nanocomposites,
and the microscopic mechanism is analyzed by the phonon density of
states, phonon participation ratio, spectral thermal conductivity,
etc. The results show that there is a significant size effect in the
geopolymer nanocomposites system due to the carbon nanotubes. In addition,
when the content of carbon nanotubes is 16.5%, the thermal conductivity
in carbon nanotubes vertical axial direction (4.85 W/(m k)) increases
by 125.6% compared with the system without carbon nanotubes (2.15
W/(m k)). However, the thermal conductivity in carbon nanotubes vertical
axial direction (1.25 W/(m k)) decreases by 41.9%, which is mainly
due to the interfacial thermal resistance and phonon scattering at
the interfaces. The above results provide theoretical guidance for
the tunable thermal conductivity in carbon nanotube-geopolymer nanocomposites.