Evaluation of thermal conductivity of amorphous materials using the excluded volume method

The thermal conductivities of amorphous materials are dominated by the contact thermal resistance between the fundamental units. Therefore, the number density of the contacts is critical to evaluate the thermal conductivities of amorphous materials. In this paper, we propose to calculate the contact number with the excluded volume method. To verify this proposal, the contact numbers and the thermal conductivities of several simple liquids are assessed. Our results agree well with that of the Monte Carlo simulations and the experiments published. This indicates that the thermal conductivities of amorphous materials can be evaluated precisely with the excluded volume method.