Grain boundaries in graphene are inherent in wafer-scale samples prepared by chemical vapor deposition. They can strongly influence the mechanical properties and electronic and heat transport in graphene. In this work, we employ extensive molecular dynamics simulations to study thermal transport in large suspended polycrystalline graphene samples. Samples of different controlled grain sizes are prepared by a recently developed efficient multiscale approach based on the phase field crystal model. In contrast to previous works, our results show that the scaling of the thermal conductivity with the grain size implies bimodal behavior with two effective Kapitza lengths. The scaling is dominated by the out-of-plane (flexural) phonons with a Kapitza length that is an order of magnitude larger than that of the in-plane phonons. We also show that, to get quantitative agreement with the most recent experiments, quantum corrections need to be applied to both the Kapitza conductance of grain boundaries and the thermal conductivity of pristine graphene, and the corresponding Kapitza lengths must be renormalized accordingly.

Two-dimensional materials have unusual phonon spectra due to the presence of flexural (out-of-plane) modes. Although molecular dynamics simulations have been extensively used to study heat transport in such materials, conventional formalisms treat the phonon dynamics isotropically. Here, we decompose the microscopic heat current in atomistic simulations into in-plane and out-of-plane components, corresponding to in-plane and out-of-plane phonon dynamics, respectively. This decomposition allows for direct computation of the corresponding thermal conductivity components in two-dimensional materials. We apply this decomposition to study heat transport in suspended graphene, using both equilibrium and nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. We show that the flexural component is responsible for about two-thirds of the total thermal conductivity in unstrained graphene, and the acoustic flexural component is responsible for the logarithmic divergence of the conductivity when a sufficiently large tensile strain is applied.