Boron nitride nanosheets were dispersed in polymers to give composite films with excellent thermal transport performances approaching the record values found in polymer/graphene nanocomposites. Similarly high performance at lower BN loadings was achieved by aligning the nanosheets in poly(vinyl alcohol) matrix by simple mechanical stretching (see picture).
Hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets (BNNs) are analogous to their two-dimensional carbon counterparts in many materials properties, in particular, ultrahigh thermal conductivity, but also offer some unique attributes, including being electrically insulating, high thermal stability, chemical and oxidation resistance, low color, and high mechanical strength. Significant recent advances in the production of BNNs, understanding of their properties, and the development of polymeric nanocomposites with BNNs for thermally conductive yet electrically insulating materials and systems are highlighted herein. Major opportunities and challenges for further studies in this rapidly advancing field are also discussed.
Lightweight nanocomposites with superior thermal transport properties promise great application potential, [1][2][3][4] for which there has been extensive development effort. [5][6][7][8] Among widely pursued nanoscale fillers in such composites are carbon nanomaterials. For example, carbon nanotubes are extremely thermally conductive at the individual-nanotube level. [9,10] More recently, single-and fewer-layer graphene sheets have been shown to be even more advantageous than carbon nanotubes, [11][12][13][14][15] especially for their uses in polymeric nanocomposites of high thermal conductivity. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] Hexagonal boron nitride (BN) is structurally analogous to graphite (Scheme 1) and has equally good thermal transport properties. [26,27] In fact, bulk BN has traditionally been considered as a material of choice in thermal-management applications. [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] In recent years both BN nanotubes and sheets have attracted growing attention for thermal transport and other uses. For example, Li and Hsu prepared composite films of polyimide with micro-and nanosized BN, including BN "nanoflakes", for which thermal conductivities of up to 1.2 W m À1 K À1 at 30 wt % BN loading were obtained. [28,29] Sato et al. also studied polyimide composites with hexagonal BN as filler, and films containing 30 and 60 vol % BN exhibited thermal conductivities of 3 and 7 W m À1 K À1 , respectively. [30] Wattanakul et al. found similar thermal conductivities in epoxy composites with 33 vol % hexagonal BN. [31] These results suggest that the thermal transport performance of polymer composites with BN is generally poorer than with graphene sheets as filler. Therefore, there are major challenges and also opportunities in the development of polymer/ BN nanocomposites with much improved performance, especially with respect to the need for lightweight composite materials with extreme ratios of thermal to electrical conductivity to exploit the electrically insulating nature of BN.In this study we exfoliated hexagonal BN in organic medium to give sheets of nanoscale thickness and dispersed the resulting BN nanosheets in poly(vinyl alcohol), PVA, and epoxy matrices. Superior thermal transport performance was achieved in the polymer/BN nanocomposite films thus fabricated, and substantial performance enhancement through mechanical alignment of BN nanosheets embedded in PVA was found. The results demonstrate that BN sheets of nanoscale thickness may indeed hold promise for polymer nanocomposites with metal-like thermal transport performance, similar to what has already been achieved in polymer nanocomposites with fewer-layer graphene sheets. [23,25] Commercially acquired hexagonal BN was sonicated vigorously in isopropyl alcohol for both dispersion and exfoliation. An aliquot of the resulting suspension was used to prepare specimens for characterization of the BN sheets by microscopy and other techniques. Representative SEM images (Figure 1 a,b) suggest lateral sizes (edge-to-edge) of the ...
Graphene is known for high thermal and electrical conductivities. In the preparation of neat carbon materials based on graphene, a common approach has been the use of well-exfoliated graphene oxides (GOs) as the precursor, followed by conversion to reduced GOs (rGOs). However, rGOs are more suitable for the targeted high electrical conductivity achievable through percolation but considerably less effective in terms of efficient thermal transport dictated by phonon progression. In this work, neat carbon films were fabricated directly from few-layer graphene sheets, avoiding rGOs completely. These essentially graphene-graphene composites were of a metal-like appearance and mechanically flexible, exhibiting superior thermal and electrical transport properties. The observed thermal and electrical conductivities are higher than 220 W/m · K and 85000 S/m, respectively. Some issues in the further development of these mechanically flexible graphene-graphene nanocomposite materials are discussed and so are the associated opportunities.
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