THERMAL TRANSPORT IN POLYMER NANOFIBER AND POLYMER NANOCOMPOSITES
Date
2025
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Effective thermal management plays a vital role in the development of electronic devices as it directly affects the devices’ lifetime, performance, and reliability. As electronic devices are more miniaturized and integrated, heat dissipation in these devices becomes more challenging. Among many materials systems, polymers have been shown to be a potential candidate due to their excellent properties, including light weight, low cost, easy to manufacture, and excellent chemical stability. However, intrinsic thermal conductivity of polymer is relatively low and not sufficient. Thus, enhancing thermal conductivity of polymer is crucial for expanding polymers applications in thermal field. In this dissertation, I present various methods to enhance thermal conductivity of polymer-based materials. In the first method, intrinsic thermal conductivity of polyethylene oxide (PEO) polymer is enhanced by engineering the internal structures. Specifically, the effect of PEO molecular weight and molecular concentration on the thermal conductivity of PEO nanofiber is investigated. In the second method, thermal conductivity is increased by creating polymer nanocomposites with the addition of thermally conductive fillers. Here, I present the fabrication of polymer nanocomposites from epoxy and boron nitride nanotube (BNNT) filler. The surface of BNNT is functionalized to improve its dispersion in the epoxy matrix. The effect of interface between functionalized BNNT and polymer matrix to the thermal conductivity of polymer nanocomposites is discussed. The results from our study could contribute to the application expansion of polymer-based materials where high thermal conductivity is required such as electronic packaging and thermal interface materials. Further, this work can be served as guidance for investigating thermal transport of other polymers and polymer nanocomposites systems.
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Mechanical engineering, Polymer, Polymer nanocomposite, Polymer nanofiber, Thermal conductivity
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109 pages
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