Breaking Through Bottlenecks for Thermally Conductive Polymer Composites:A Perspective for Intrinsic Thermal Conductivity,Interfacial Thermal Resistance and Theoretics

Rapid development of energy,electrical and electronic technologies has put forward higher requirements for the thermal conductivities of polymers and their composites.However,the thermal conductivity coefficient(λ)values of prepared thermally conductive polymer composites are still difficult to achieve expectations,which has become the bottleneck in the fields of thermally conductive polymer composites.Aimed at that,based on the accumulation of the previous research works by related researchers and our research group,this paper proposes three possible directions for breaking through the bottlenecks:(1)preparing and synthesizing intrinsically thermally conductive polymers,(2)reducing the interfacial thermal resistance in thermally conductive polymer composites,and(3)establishing suitable thermal conduction models and studying inner thermal conduction mechanism to guide experimental optimization.Also,the future development trends of the three above-mentioned directions are foreseen,hoping to provide certain basis and guidance for the preparation,researches and development of thermally conductive polymers and their composites.

Recent Progress in Fabrication and Structural Design of Thermal Conductive Polymer Composites

In recent years, the demand direction for electronic equipment has expanded into embedded and miniaturized devices. The heat radiation problem has become one of the most significant factors for hindering the development of electronic devices. Since heat radiation material is one of the important components in electronic devices, the demand for enhancing thermal conductivity is also increasingly urgent. Research on thermal conductive polymer composites has become a major direction for developing functional composites. This work reviewed the recent progress in the fabrication of thermal conductive polymer composites. Five different structures are presented, including the using of single fillers,hybrid fillers, double threshold percolation structure, segregated structure and other complex multiphase structures. Specifically, the preparation of high-performance thermal conductive polymer composites was introduced through the combination of various thermal conductive fillers.Finally, the development direction of high thermal conductive polymer composites was briefly explored.

Analysis on the Characteristic Properties of PEDOT Nano-particle Based on Reversed Micelle Method

Based on the study of a new type of conducting polymer poly （3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene） （PEDOT）,we focussed on the preparation and characteristics of PEDOT nanoparticles made by reversed micelle method.Moreover,we deeply investigated the optical,electrical and the thermal stability of PEDOT nanoparticles.The main results are as follows： the small-sized PEDOT nanoparticles were prepared and utilized by different methods,such as ultraviolet/visible （UV-Vis） spectroscopy,Fourier-transform infrared （FT- IR） spectrum,scanning electron microscopy（SEM） and so on.The results show that the amount of oxidizer,ultrasonic treatment,polymerizing temperature and doping degree can influent morphology,electrical ability and gas sensitivity of PEDOT nanoparticles.The Bragg peaks of nanoparticles at 6.7°,12.7°,25° were observed by XRD and the better orientation of molecular chain was attributed to the effective doping of toluene-p-sulfonic acid,which also resulted in an enhancement of thermal stability of nanoparticles than conventional PEDOT.

Preparation and characterization of conducting polymer-coated thermally expandable microspheres

The thermally expandable microspheres（TEMs） were prepared via suspension polymerization with acrylonitrile（AN）, methyl methacrylate（MMA） and methyl acrylate（MA） as monomers and n-hexane as the blowing agent. Meanwhile, a novel type of functional and conductive thermal expandable microsphere was obtained through strongly covering the surface of microsphere by conductive polymers with the mass loading of 1.5%. The optimal conditions to prepare high foaming ratio and equally distributed microcapsules were investigated with AN-MMA-MA in the proportion of 70%/20%/10%（m/m/m）, and 25 wt% of n-hexane in oil phase. The further investigation results showed that the unexpanded TEMs were about 30 μm in diameter and the maximum expansion ratio was nearly 125 times of original volume. The polypyrrole（PPy） was smoothly coated on the surface of the TEMs and the expansion property of PPy-coated TEMs was almost the same as the uncoated TEMs. Moreover, the structure and expanding performance of TEMs and PPy-coated TEMs were characterized by scanning electron microscopy（SEM）, laser particle size analyzer and dilatometer（DIL）.