General formulation of coupled radiative and conductive heat transfer between compact bodies

Abstract

We present a general framework for studying strongly coupled radiative and conductive heat transfer between arbitrarily shaped bodies separated by sub-wavelength distances. Our formulation is based on a macroscopic approach that couples our recent fluctuating volume--current (FVC) method of near-field heat transfer to the more well known Fourier conduction transport equation. We apply our technique to consider heat exchange between aluminum-zinc oxide nanorods and show that the presence of bulk plasmon resonances can result in extremely large radiative heat transfer rates (roughly twenty times larger than observed in planar geometries), whose interplay with conductive transport leads to nonlinear temperature profiles along the nanorods.