Emerging Flexible Thermally Conductive Films:Mechanism,Fabrication,Application

Effective thermal management is quite urgent for electronics owing to their ever-growing integration degree,operation frequency and power density,and the main strategy of thermal management is to remove excess energy from electronics to outside by thermal conductive materials.Compared to the conventional thermal management materials,flexible thermally conductive films with high in-plane thermal conductivity,as emerging candidates,have aroused greater interest in the last decade,which show great potential in thermal management applications of next-generation devices.However,a comprehensive review of flexible thermally conductive films is rarely reported.Thus,we review recent advances of both intrinsic polymer films and polymer-based composite films with ultrahigh in-plane thermal conductivity,with deep understandings of heat transfer mechanism,processing methods to enhance thermal conductivity,optimization strategies to reduce interface thermal resistance and their potential applications.Lastly,challenges and opportunities for the future development of flexible thermally conductive films are also discussed.

Fabrication of High-Haze Flexible Transparent Conductive PMMA Films Embedded with Silver Nanowires

High-haze flexible transparent conductive polymethyl methacrylate （PMMA） films embedded with silver nanowires （AgNWs） are fabricated by a low-cost and simple process. The volatilization rate of the solvent in PMMA solution affects the surface microstructures and morphologies, which results in different haze factors of the composite films. The areal mass density of AgNW shows a significant influence on the optical and electrical properties of composite films. The AgNW/PMMA transparent conductive films with the sheet resistance of 5.5Ω sq ^-1 exhibit an excellent performance with a high haze factor of 81.0% at 550？nm.

A Novel Method of Fabricating Flexible Transparent Conductive Large Area Graphene Film

We fabricate flexible conductive and transparent graphene films on position-emission-tomography substrates and prepare large area graphene films by graphite oxide sheets with the new technical process. The multi-layer graphene oxide sheets can be chemically reduced by HNO3 and HI to form a highly conductive graphene film on a substrate at lower temperature. The reduced graphene oxide sheets show a high conductivity sheet with resistance of 476Ω/sq and transmittance of 76% at 550nm （6 layers）. The technique used to produce the transparent conductive graphene thin film is facile, inexpensive, and can be tunable for a large area production applied for electronics or touch screens.

Enhancing the thermal conductivity of nanofibrillated cellulose films with 1D BN belts formed by in-situ generation and sintering of BN nanosheets

The rapid miniaturization and high integration of modern electronic devices have brought an increasing demand for polymer-based thermal management materials with higher thermal conductivity.Boron nitride nanosheets(BNNs)have been widely used as thermally conductive fillers benefiting from the extremely high intrinsic thermal conductivity.However,the small lateral size and weak interface bonding of BNNs enabled them to only form thermally conductive networks through physical overlap,resulting in high interfacial thermal resistance.To address this issue,an innovative strategy based on interface engineering was proposed in this study.High-aspect-ratio boron nitride belts(BNbs)were successfully synthesized by carbon thermal reduction nitridation method through the in-situ generation and sintering of BNNs.The surface of BNb showed the sintering of numerous smaller-sized BNNs,which precisely addresses the issue of weak interfacial bonding between BNNs.On this basis,the as-synthesized BNbs were combined with nano-fibrillated cellulose(NFC)to prepare NFC/BNb composite films through a facile vacuum filtration process.Due to the thermally conductive network formed by the horizontal oriented arrangement of BNb and their particular morphological advantages,the NFC/BNb films demonstrated significantly higher in-plane thermal conductivity than that of NFC/BNNs films,achieving the highest value of 19.119 W·m^(−1)·K^(−1) at a 20 wt%filling fraction.In addition,the NFC/BNb films also exhibited superior thermal stability,mechanical strength,flexibility,and electrical insulation performance,suggesting the significant application potential of the designed BNb fillers in the thermal management field.