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Proceedings of HT2005 2005 ASME Summer Heat Transfer ConferenceJuly 17-22, 2005, San Francisco, California, USA HT2005-72172 Thermal Transport in Nanotube Composites for Large-Area Macroelectronics Satish Kumar Department of Mechanical Engineering Purdue University 585 Purdue Mall W. Lafayette IN 47907 Mohammad A. Alam Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Purdue University 465 Northwestern Avenue W. Lafayette IN 47907 Jayathi Y. Murthy Department of Mechanical Engineering Purdue University 585 Purdue Mall W. Lafayette IN 47907  Abstract Thermal transport in a new class of nanocomposites composed of isotropic 2D ensembles of nanotubes or nanowires in a substrate is considered for use as the channel region of thin film transistors. The random ensemble is generated numerically and simulated using a finite volume scheme. The effective thermal conductivity of a nanotube network embedded in a thin substrate is computed. Percolating conduction in the composite is studied as a function of wire/tube densities and channel lengths. The conductance exponents are validated against available experimental data for long channels devices. The effect of tube-tube contact conductance, tube-substrate contact conductance and substrate-tube conductivity ratio is analyzed for various channel lengths. It is found that beyond a certain limiting value, contact parameters do not result in any significant change in the effective thermal conductivity of the composite. It is also observed that the effective thermal conductivity of the composite saturates beyond a limiting channel-length/tube length ratio for the range of contact parameters under consideration. introduction In recent years, there has been growing interest in low-cost large-area manufacture of thin film transistors (TFTs) on flexible substrates for use in applications such as displays, e-paper, e-clothing, biological and chemical sensing, conformal radar, and other