Graphene-Perfluoroalkoxy Nanocomposite with High Through-Plane Thermal Conductivity Fabricated by Hot-Pressing.

Xinru Zhang,Xiaoyu Xie,Zeyi Jiang,Xinxin Zhang,Jian Hu,Yujie Ren,Xinzhi Cai,Ting Gao

doi:10.3390/nano9091320

Abstract

With the rapid development of electronics and portable devices, polymer nanocomposites with high through-plane thermal conductivity (TC) are urgently needed. In this work, we fabricated graphene nanosheets−perfluoroalkoxy (GNs−PFA) composite sheets with high through-plane TCs via hot-pressing followed by mechanical machining. When the GNs content exceeded 10 wt%, GNs were vertically aligned in the PFA matrix, and the through-plane TCs of nanocomposites were 10–15 times higher than their in-plane TCs. In particular, the composite with 30 wt% GNs exhibited a through-plane TC of 25.57 W/(m·K), which was 9700% higher than that of pure PFA. The composite with 30 wt% GNs was attached to the surface of a high-power light-emitting diode (LED) to assess its heat-dissipation capability. The composite with vertically aligned GNs lowered the LED surface temperature by approximately 16 °C compared with pure PFA. Our facile, low-cost method allows for the large-scale production of GNs–PFA nanocomposites with high through-plane TCs, which can be used in various thermal-management applications.

Highlights

Thermal management has become one of the most critical challenges in the design of electronic components, smart phones, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), touch panels, etc. [1,2]
The above studies indicate that it is promising to fabricate the high-performance polymer nanocomposites with well aligned nanosheets by using this facile and low-cost hot-pressing method
It should be noted that these examples are 2D films that exhibit high in-plane thermal conductivity (TC), because the alignment direction of boron nitride nanosheets (BNNs) is parallel to the surface of composite film

Summary

Introduction

Thermal management has become one of the most critical challenges in the design of electronic components, smart phones, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), touch panels, etc. [1,2]. Kumar et al used a liquid-crystal method to fabricate composite films with layer-aligned GNs in polyvinylidene fluoride co-hexafluoropropylene, and reported that the composite film had an in-plane TC of 19.5 W/(m·K) at a GNs content of 27.2 wt% [26]. Using the vacuum filtration method, Li et al fabricated layer aligned GNs–epoxy composite with an in-plane TC of 16.75 W/(m·K) at a GNs content of 11.8 wt% [22].

Results

Conclusion