Developing a composite material of polymers and micrometer-sized fillers with higher heat conductance is crucial to realize modular packaging of electronic components at higher densities. Enhancement mechanisms of the heat conductance of the polymer-filler interfaces by adding the surface-coupling agent in such a polymer composite material are investigated through the non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. A simulation system is composed of α-alumina as the filler, bisphenol-A epoxy molecules as the polymers, and model molecules for the surface-coupling agent. The inter-atomic potential between the α-alumina and surface-coupling molecule, which is essential in the present MD simulation, is constructed to reproduce the calculated energies with the electronic density-functional theory. Through the non-equilibrium MD simulation runs, we find that the thermal resistance at the interface decreases significantly by increasing either number or lengths of the surface-coupling molecules and that the effective thermal conductivity of the system approaches to the theoretical value corresponding to zero thermal-resistance at the interface. Detailed analyses about the atomic configurations and local temperatures around the interface are performed to identify heat-transfer routes through the interface.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.