Extremely High Thermal Conductivity of Aligned Bulk Carbon Nanotube-Polyethylene Composites

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through simulations that aligning carbon nanotubes within polyethylene significantly boosts the composite's thermal conductivity, surpassing traditional random doping methods.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of aligned carbon nanotube-polyethylene composites and shows their superior thermal conductivity via molecular dynamics simulations.

Findings

Aligned composites have higher thermal conductivity than random ones.

Alignment enhances thermal conduction of polyethylene chains.

Predictions could guide manufacturing of high-performance thermal materials.

Abstract

The poor thermal conductivity of bulk polymers may be enhanced by combining them with high thermal conductivity materials such as carbon nanotubes. Different from random doping, we find that the aligned carbon nanotube-polyethylene composites (ACPCs) has a high thermal conductivity by non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. The analyses indicate that the aligned structure can not only take advantage of the high thermal conduction of carbon nanotubes, but enhance thermal conduction of polyethylene (PE) chains. Our predictions may inspire manufacturing aligned polymer-based composites for a wide variety of applications.