Thermal transport cross section and phase function of longitudinal phonons for scattering by nanoparticles and microparticles

This paper deals with the calculation of the thermal transport cross section and phase function of longitudinal phonons for scattering by nanoparticles and microparticles. Thermal transport cross section is different from the scattering cross section due to the anisotropic nature of scattering. Exact formulation of the phase function is given for the Rayleigh scattering. This paper also proposes an approximate method to calculate the thermal transport cross section for low contrast scatterers. The formulations developed in this paper will be useful for the predictive modeling of thermal conductivity of practical systems such as nanocomposites and nanomicro particle laden systems.