Isotropically Ultrahigh Thermal Conductive Polymer Composites by Assembling Anisotropic Boron Nitride Nanosheets into a Biaxially Oriented Network.

Abstract

The demand for thermally conductive but electrically insulating materials has increased greatly in advanced electronic packaging. To this end, polymer-based composites filled with boron nitride (BN) nanosheets have been intensively studied as thermal interface material (TIM). However, it remains a great challenge to achieve isotropically ultrahigh thermal conductivity in BN/polymer composites due to the inherent thermal property anisotropy of BN nanosheets and/or the insufficient construction of the 3D thermal conductive network. Herein, we present a high-performance BN/polymer composite with a biaxially oriented thermal conductive network by a dendritic ice template. The composite exhibits both ultrahigh in-plane (∼39.0 W m-1 K-1) and through-plane thermal conductivity (∼11.5 W m-1 K-1) at 80 vol % BN loading, largely exceeding those of reported BN/polymer composites. In addition, our composite as a TIM shows higher cooling efficiency than that of commercial TIM with up to 15 °C reduction of the chip temperature and retains good thermal stability even after 1000 heating/cooling cycles. Our strategy represents an effective approach for developing advanced thermal interface materials, which are greatly demanded for advanced electronics and emerging areas like wearable electronics.