Smart polymer composites with vertically oriented boron nitride and carbon fiber for heat management: Magneto-thermal responsiveness

Abstract

Emerging structural materials for aerospace deformable structures, soft robotics, and advanced smart electronic devices necessitate reversible, lockable, and reprogrammable shape transformation capabilities. A challenge in this realm is heat accumulation in high-power density devices, which limited impedes broader applications of these materials. This study introduces magneto-thermal coupling response and efficient heat dissipation to structural composite, facilitating reversible and reprogrammable material deformation. Our composites prepared using bi-directional freeze casting strategy demonstrated excellent thermal management capabilities. When the composites were applied to the chip heat dissipation, the chip temperature was significantly reduced by 36.3 °C from 112.2 °C. Furthermore, the integration of a flexible boron nitride nanosheets (BNNS)/carbon fibers (CFs) network with magnetic Fe3O4 particles and phase-change material enables effective magneto-thermal response. This magnetically controlled thermal deformation behavior of composites provides a promising avenue for the development of multimodal morphing structures for soft robotics and aerospace applications.