High thermal conductivity in amorphous polymer blends by engineered interchain interactions

Abstract

Thermal conductivity is an important property for polymers, as it often affects product reliability (for example, electronics packaging), functionality (for example, thermal interface materials) and/or manufacturing cost. However, polymer thermal conductivities primarily fall within a relatively narrow range (0.1-0.5 W m-1 K-1) and are largely unexplored. Here, we show that a blend of two polymers with high miscibility and appropriately chosen linker structure can yield a dense and homogeneously distributed thermal network. A sharp increase in cross-plane thermal conductivity is observed under these conditions, reaching over 1.5 W m-1 K-1 in typical spin-cast polymer blend films of nanoscale thickness, which is approximately an order of magnitude larger than that of other amorphous polymers.