Heat Management

(1) Engineering H-bond

Molecular level engineering of polymer or polymer blends has been recently demonstrated effective strategy to regulate thermal conductivity. Such materials are of great interest to meet critical requirements of transparent, light weight, flexible, etc for thermal management in electronic applications. In this work, modulated polymer blends with poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and biopolymers (lignin, gelatin) were designed and significantly enhanced thermal conductivity was achieved by tuning the intermolecular interaction among polymer components. The hydrogen bond interaction has been revealed as the major driving force that affects the polymer coil dimension in aqueous solution, the microstructure of coil-coil interaction in solid film and thus the thermal conduction. A solid relationship across molecular level interaction to macro-scale thermal conduction is constructed via careful characterization of the coil size in liquid phase and assembled microstructure in solid phase. Appropriate integration of biopolymers and PVA is essential to achieve synergistic effect. Specifically, thermal conductivity of polymer blend with 10% lignin and 10% G90 in PVA reaches 0.71 W/m·K, which is 184% enhancement as compared to pure PVA.

(2) Biomimetic Self-organization of Structural Crystals

poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA)/amino acid (AA) composites were prepared by a self-organized crystallization process. Five different AAs (cysteine, aspartic acid, glutamic acid, ornithine, and lysine) were selected based on their similar functional groups but different molecular structures. The different PVA–AA interactions in the five PVA/AA composites lead to two crystal patterns, i.e., continuous network (cysteine and lysine) and discrete particles (glutamic acid, ornithine, and aspartic acid). Scanning thermal microscopy is then applied to map the distribution of thermal conduction in these composites. It is found that the interface surrounding the crystals plays a dominating role in phonon transport where the polymer chains are greatly restrained by the interfacial confinement effect. Continuous crystal network builds up a continuous interface that facilitates phonon transfer while phonon scattering occurs in discrete crystalline structures. Significantly improved thermal conductivity of ∼0.7 W/m·K is observed in PVA/cysteine composite with AA loading of 8.4 wt %, which corresponds to a 170% enhancement as compared to pure PVA. The strong PVA–AA molecular interaction and self-organized crystal structure are considered the major reasons for the unique interface property and superior thermal conductivity.

(3) Micro-/Nano- Thermal Characterization