Thermal conductivity of polymers and polymer nanocomposites

TL;DR

This review summarizes the mechanisms of thermal transport in polymers and discusses recent strategies to enhance their thermal conductivity through nanostructuring and composites, highlighting progress, challenges, and future outlooks.

Contribution

It provides a systematic overview of molecular-level understanding and recent advancements in improving thermal conductivity of polymers and nanocomposites.

Findings

Understanding of thermal transport mechanisms in polymers

Recent methods for enhancing thermal conductivity

Main challenges and future prospects in the field

Abstract

Polymers are widely used in industry and in our daily life because of their diverse functionality, light weight, low cost and excellent chemical stability. However, on some applications such as heat exchangers and electronic packaging, the low thermal conductivity of polymers is one of the major technological barriers. Enhancing the thermal conductivity of polymers is important for these applications and has become a very active research topic over the past two decades. In this review article, we aim to: 1). systematically summarize the molecular level understanding on the thermal transport mechanisms in polymers in terms of polymer morphology, chain structure and inter-chain coupling; 2). highlight the rationales in the recent efforts in enhancing the thermal conductivity of nanostructured polymers and polymer nanocomposites. Finally, we outline the main advances, challenges and outlooks for highly thermal-conductive polymer and polymer nanocomposites.