Poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) hydrogels with tissue-like viscoelasticity, excellent biocompatibility, and high hydrophilicity have been considered as promising cartilage replacement materials. However, lack of sufficient mechanical properties is a critical barrier to their use as load-bearing cartilage substitutes. Herein, we report hydroxylated boron nitride nanosheets (OH-BNNS)/PVA interpenetrating hydrogels by cyclically freezing/thawing the aqueous mixture of PVA and highly hydrophilic OH-BNNS (up to 0.6 mg/mL, two times the highest reported so far). Encouragingly, the resulting OH-BNNS/PVA hydrogels exhibit controllable reinforcements in both mechanical and thermal responses by simply varying the OH-BNNS contents. Impressive 45, 43, and 63% increases in compressive, tensile strengths and Young's modulus, respectively, can be obtained even with only 0.12 wt% (OH-BNNS:PVA) OH-BNNS addition. Meanwhile, exciting improvements in the thermal diffusivity (15%) and conductivity (5%) can also be successfully achieved. These enhancements are attributed to the synergistic effect of intrinsic superior properties of the as-prepared OH-BNNS and strong hydrogen bonding interactions between the OH-BNNS and PVA chains. In addition, excellent cytocompatibility of the composite hydrogels was verified by cell proliferation and live/dead viability assays. These biocompatible OH-BNNS/PVA hydrogels are promising in addressing the mechanical failure and locally overheating issues as cartilage substitutes and may also have broad utility for biomedical applications, such as drug delivery, tissue engineering, biosensors, and actuators.

We demonstrate the thermal conductivity enhancement of the vertically aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays (from ∼15.5 to 29.5 W/mK, ∼90% increase) by encapsulating outer boron nitride nanotube (BNNT, 0.97 nm-thick with ∼3-4 walls). The heat transfer enhancement mechanism of the coaxial C@BNNT was further revealed by molecular dynamics simulations. Because of their highly coherent lattice structures, the outer BNNT serves as additional heat conducting path without impairing the thermal conductance of inner CNT. This work provides deep insights into tailoring the heat transfer of arbitrary CNT arrays and will enable their broader applications as thermal interface material.

Vertically self-ordered hexagonal boron nitride (ordered h-BN) is a highly ordered turbostratic BN (t-BN) material similar to hexagonal BN, with its planar structure perpendicularly oriented to the substrate. The ordered h-BN thin films were grown using a High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HiPIMS) system with a lanthanum hexaboride (LaB6) target reactively sputtered in nitrogen gas. The best vertical alignment was obtained at room temperature, with a grounded bias and a HiPIMS peak power density of 60 W cm(-2). Even though the film contains up to 7.5 at% lanthanum, it retains its highly insulative properties and it was observed that an increase in compressive stress is correlated to an increase in film ordering quality. Importantly, the thermal conductivity of vertically ordered h-BN is considerably high at 5.1 W m(-1) K(-1). The favourable thermal conductivity coupled with the dielectric properties of this novel material and the low temperature growth could outperform SiO2 in high power density electronic applications.

High anisotropic thermal materials, which allow heat to dissipate in a preferential direction, are of interest as a prospective material for electronics as an effective thermal management solution for hot spots. However, due to their preferential heat propagation in the in-plane direction, the heat spreads laterally instead of vertically. This limitation makes these materials ineffective as the density of hot spots increases. Here, we produce a new dielectric thin film material at room temperature, named vertically ordered nanocrystalline h-BN (voBN). It is produced such that its preferential thermally conductive direction is aligned in the vertical axis, which facilitates direct thermal extraction, thereby addressing the increasing challenge of thermal crosstalk. The uniqueness of voBN comes from its h-BN nanocrystals where all their basal planes are aligned in the direction normal to the substrate plane. Using the 3ω method, we show that voBN exhibits high anisotropic thermal conductivity (TC) with a 16-fold difference between through-film TC and in-plane TC (respectively 4.26 and 0.26 W·m·K). Molecular dynamics simulations also concurred with the experimental data, showing that the origin of this anisotropic behavior is due to the nature of voBN's plane ordering. While the consistent vertical ordering provides an uninterrupted and preferred propagation path for phonons in the through-film direction, discontinuity in the lateral direction leads to a reduced in-plane TC. In addition, we also use COMSOL to simulate how the dielectric and thermal properties of voBN enable an increase in hot spot density up to 295% compared with SiO, without any temperature increase.

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