Pulsating Heat Stripes: A Composite Polymer Sheet with Enhanced Thermal Conductivity

Abstract

The use of polymeric materials to replace metallic parts is the obvious choice to address weight and cost constraints in a large number of devices and applications, including space, aircraft and portable electronics applications. While polymeric materials offer excellent features of mechanical flexibility, resistance to fatigue, low weight and low cost in comparison with metallic materials, they exhibit poor heat transfer performance due to their low-thermal conductivity. Recently, there were several attempts to increase the thermal conductivity of polymers by means of high-thermal conductivity additives and fillers, such as minerals, fibres and metals (Mazumdar in Composites Manufacturing: Materials, Product, and Process Engineering, CRC Press, 2001 [1]).Commonly used fillers include particles (Kumlutas and Tavman in J Thermoplast Compos Mater 19:441–455, 2006 [2]; Krupa et al. in Eur Polymer J 43:2443–2452, 2007 [3]), fibres (Tavman and Akinci in Int Commun Heat Mass Transfer 27:253–261, 2000 [4]), metal powders or particles (Maiti and Ghosh in J Appl Polym Sci 52:1091–1103, 1994 [5]; Chae et al. in Mol Cryst Liq Cryst 464:233–241, 2007 [6]) and carbon nanotubes (Biercuk et al. in Appl. Phys. Lett. 80:2767–2769, 2000 [7[; Haggenmueller et al. in Macromolecules 40:2417–2421, 2007 [8]; Winey et al. in MRS Bull 32:348–353, 2007 [9]).