Enhanced thermal conductivity of boron nitride epoxy‐matrix composite through multi‐modal particle size mixing

Abstract

Castable particulate-filled epoxy resins exhibiting excellent thermal conductivity have been prepared using hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and cubic boron nitride (cBN) as fillers. The thermal conductivity of boron nitride filled epoxy matrix composites was enhanced up to 217% through silane surface treatment of fillers and multi-modal particle size mixing (two different hBN particle sizes and one cBN particle size) prior to fabricating the composite. The measurements and interpretation of the curing kinetics of anhydride cured epoxies as continuous matrix, loaded with BN having multi-modal particle size distribution, as heat conductive fillers, are highlighted. This study evidences the importance of surface engineering and multi-modal mixing distribution applied in inorganic fillered epoxy-matrix composite.

Modelling of the thermal conductivity in polymer nanocomposites and the impact of the interface between filler and matrix

“…Most polymers have a thermal conductivity between 0.1 and 0.6 W m −1 K −1 [1]. In order to improve the thermal conductivity of polymers, inorganic fillers with a higher thermal conductivity than the host, such as aluminium nitride (AlN) [2][3][4][5][6][7][8], boron nitride (BN) [3,4,6,[9][10][11][12], aluminium oxide (Al 2 O 3 ) [4,10,13,14], silicon dioxide (SiO 2 ) [4,15,16], silicon carbide (SiC) [10,13], silicon nitride (Si 3 N 4 ) [10,15,17], carbon nanotubes [18,19] and nanodiamond [15,16], are used to create polymer-based composites with improved thermal conduction.…”

Enhanced Performance of Induction Cookers by the Use of Polymer Composites

“…Several polymer composites using aluminum nitride (AlN) [4] and boron nitride (BN) [5] powders (or fillers) were fabricated and their performance was tested. Some important physical properties, including the purity and the size, are summarized in Table 1.…”

Improvement of Soft Tooling Process Through Particle Reinforcement with Polyurethane Mould

“…A significant amount of research works was found where particulate filler materials were introduced in polymer to increase its effective thermal conductivity (Agrawal et al, 2000;Boudenne et al, 2004;Miller et al, 2006;Mu, Feng and Diao, 2007;Subodh et al, 2008;Vinod, Varghese and Kuriakose, 2004;Sundstrom and Chen, 1970;Kim et al, 2008;Pal, 2007). The equivalent thermal conductivity (ETC) of particulate filled polymer composites was also investigated with the variation of various morphological properties of conductive filler particles (Ye, Shentu and Weng, 2006), multi-modal particle size mixing (Yung and Liem, 2007) as well as using hybrid filler materials (Lee et al, 2006). Moreover, addition of filler particles in mould material increases the effective modulus of elasticity of mould materials (Tavman, 1997;Rusu, Sofian and Rusu, 2001;Papanicolaou and Bakos, 1992).…”