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Thermal Management Using Polymers and Polymer Composites and Their Applications

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A special issue of Polymers (ISSN 2073-4360). This special issue belongs to the section "Polymer Physics and Theory".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2022) | Viewed by 18782

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Special Issue Editor

Dr. Nitin Mehra

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Guest Editor

Intelligent Composites Laboratory, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325, USA
Interests: polymers; heat dissipating materials; composites; thermal management, transparent materials

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Efficient thermal management means an energy efficient system which should lead to less carbon footprints and reduced burden on fossil fuels. Materials for such systems should help in effective dissipation of heat and contribute to improved performance and reliability for any application they are being employed.

In today's world, increasing demand for fast and efficient computing, the development of high performance processors is a great necessity. High performance on a micro-processor means high transistor density which comes with the cost of high heat generation. This adversity effects the lifetime and performance of processors and additionally leads to high cooling cost. Thermal management is critical for the development of high performance processors and transistors. The growing trend in electronics packaging has been to reduce size and increase performance that means increased functionality in small size. Presence of all the desired features in a small package mandates that thermal management be given prime priority to increase system performance and reliability in power electronics. Application of thermally conductive materials is quite diverse and broad ranging from aerospace to automobile to electronic packaging.

In several industries, everywhere there is heat management or storage needs the material of this kind can improve life time reliability and enhanced performance of the system. These materials are in great demand in the field of manufacturing or fabrication of microprocessors, chips on board, semiconductor etc. But application of such material can be as vast as heat exchangers, aerospace, automobiles etc.

These objectives can be greatly achieved by employing efficient thermal management materials. Polymer based composite using fillers like ceramic, carbon and metallic for thermal conduction applications with low phonon scattering at the matrix-filler interface can result in highly enhanced thermal performance. Not only polymer composites but exploring the fundamental properties of heat conduction in polymer chains and engineering those properties can provide a new avenue for the design and development of heat dissipation materials using neat polymers itself without need of fillers. Overall, thermal management using polymers and its composites can provide a wide spectrum of approaches to achieve a desired thermal performance.

Dr. Nitin Mehra
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Polymers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

thermal management
thermal conductivity
thermal interface materials
polymers
composites
phonon
phonon scattering
interfacial thermal resistance
heat spreaders

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

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12 pages, 2180 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Influence of Ambient Temperature on Radiative and Convective Heat Dissipation Ratio in Polymer Heat Sinks

by Jan Kominek, Martin Zachar, Michal Guzej, Erik Bartuli and Petr Kotrbacek

Polymers 2021, 13(14), 2286; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym13142286 - 12 Jul 2021

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2875

Abstract

Miniaturization of electronic devices leads to new heat dissipation challenges and traditional cooling methods need to be replaced by new better ones. Polymer heat sinks may, thanks to their unique properties, replace standardly used heat sink materials in certain applications, especially in applications with high ambient temperature. Polymers natively dispose of high surface emissivity in comparison with glossy metals. This high emissivity allows a larger amount of heat to be dissipated to the ambient with the fourth power of its absolute surface temperature. This paper shows the change in radiative and convective heat transfer from polymer heat sinks used in different ambient temperatures. Furthermore, the observed polymer heat sinks have differently oriented graphite filler caused by their molding process differences, therefore their thermal conductivity anisotropies and overall cooling efficiencies also differ. Furthermore, it is also shown that a high radiative heat transfer leads to minimizing these cooling efficiency differences between these polymer heat sinks of the same geometry. The measurements were conducted at HEATLAB, Brno University of Technology. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thermal Management Using Polymers and Polymer Composites and Their Applications)

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14 pages, 5749 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Design of Thermal Insulation Materials with Different Geometries of Channels

by Daniela Șova, Mariana Domnica Stanciu and Sergiu Valeriu Georgescu

Polymers 2021, 13(13), 2217; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym13132217 - 5 Jul 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2593

Abstract

Investigating the large number of various materials now available, some materials scientists promoted a method of combining existing materials with geometric features. By studying natural materials, the performance of simple constituent materials is improved by manipulating their internal geometry; as such, any base material can be used by performing millimeter-scale air channels. The porous structure obtained utilizes the low thermal conductivity of the gas in the pores. At the same time, heat radiation and gas convection is hindered by the solid structure. The solution that was proposed in this research for obtaining a material with porous structure consisted in perforating extruded polystyrene (XPS) panels, as base material. Perforation was performed horizontally and at an angle of 45 degrees related to the face panel. The method is simple and cost-effective. Perforated and simple XPS panels were subjected to three different temperature regimes in order to measure the thermal conductivity. There was an increase in thermal conductivity with the increase in average temperature in all studied cases. The presence of air channels reduced the thermal conductivity of the perforated panels. The reduction was more significant at the panels with inclined channels. The differences between the thermal conductivity of simple XPS and perforated XPS panels are small, but the latter can be improved by increasing the number of channels and the air channels’ diameter. Additionally, the higher the thermal conductivity of the base material, the more significant is the presence of the channels, reducing the effective thermal conductivity. A base material with low emissivity may also reduce the thermal conductivity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thermal Management Using Polymers and Polymer Composites and Their Applications)

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24 pages, 18292 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Improving Cooling Performance of Injection Molding Tool with Conformal Cooling Channel by Adding Hybrid Fillers

by Chil-Chyuan Kuo and Wei-Hua Chen

Polymers 2021, 13(8), 1224; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym13081224 - 10 Apr 2021

Cited by 28 | Viewed by 4217

Abstract

Silicone rubber mold (SRM) is capable of reducing the cost and time in a new product development phase and has many applications for the pilot runs. Unfortunately, the SRM after injection molding has a poor cooling efficiency due to its low thermal conductivity. To improve the cooling efficiency, the thermal conductivity of the SRM was improved by adding fillers into the SRM. An optimal recipe for fabricating a high cooling efficiency low-pressure injection mold with conformal cooling channel fabricated by fused deposition modeling technology was proposed and implemented. This study proposes a recipe combining 52.6 wt.% aluminum powder, 5.3 wt.% graphite powder, and 42.1 wt.% liquid silicon rubber can be used to make SRM with excellent cooling efficiency. The price–performance ratio of this SRM made by the proposed recipe is around 55. The thermal conductivity of the SRM made by the proposed recipe can be increased by up to 77.6% compared with convention SRM. In addition, the actual cooling time of the injection molded product can be shortened up to 69.1% compared with the conventional SRM. The actual cooling time obtained by the experiment is in good agreement with the simulation results with the relative error rate about 20%. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thermal Management Using Polymers and Polymer Composites and Their Applications)

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13 pages, 3953 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Importance of Melt Flow Direction during Injection Molding on Polymer Heat Sinks’ Cooling Efficiency

by Michal Guzej, Martin Zachar, Jan Kominek, Petr Kotrbacek and Robert Brachna

Polymers 2021, 13(8), 1186; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym13081186 - 7 Apr 2021

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2460

Abstract

Polymers with highly conductive fillers could possibly replace standardly used materials, such as aluminum and copper alloys, for passive cooling purposes. The main problem of the composite polymer-based heat sinks is that their high thermal conductivity is uneven. The orientation of this anisotropy is set according to the position of the highly thermally conductive filler. Its orientation is influenced by the melt flow during the polymer heat sink molding process. This article shows that change of the melt flow inside the mold cavity can improve the overall cooling efficiency of a polymer heat sink, which leads to lower temperatures on the heat source used. Two polymer heat sinks of identical geometries were produced. Their high thermal conductivity was given by the use of graphite flakes as the filler. The only difference between the heat sinks was in the position of the fan gate during their production. Different temperatures of the heat source between the two heat sinks were observed for the same measurement conditions. The measurements were conducted at Heatlab, BUT. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thermal Management Using Polymers and Polymer Composites and Their Applications)

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Review

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25 pages, 44452 KiB

Open AccessReview

Recent Advances in Design and Preparation of Polymer-Based Thermal Management Material

by Hongli Zhang, Tiezhu Shi and Aijie Ma

Polymers 2021, 13(16), 2797; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym13162797 - 20 Aug 2021

Cited by 25 | Viewed by 5383

Abstract

The boosting of consumer electronics and 5G technology cause the continuous increment of the power density of electronic devices and lead to inevitable overheating problems, which reduces the operation efficiency and shortens the service life of electronic devices. Therefore, it is the primary task and a prerequisite to explore innovative material for meeting the requirement of high heat dissipation performance. In comparison with traditional thermal management material (e.g., ceramics and metals), the polymer-based thermal management material exhibit excellent mechanical, electrical insulation, chemical resistance and processing properties, and therefore is considered to be the most promising candidate to solve the heat dissipation problem. In this review, we summarized the recent advances of two typical polymer-based thermal management material including thermal-conduction thermal management material and thermal-storage thermal management material. Furtherly, the structural design, processing strategies and typical applications for two polymer-based thermal management materials were discussed. Finally, we proposed the challenges and prospects of the polymer-based thermal management material. This work presents new perspectives to develop advanced processing approaches and construction high-performance polymer-based thermal management material. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thermal Management Using Polymers and Polymer Composites and Their Applications)

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