Highly Thermal Conductive Poly(vinyl alcohol) Composites with Oriented Hybrid Networks: Silver Nanowire Bridged Boron Nitride Nanoplatelets

With the increasing demand for thermal management materials in the highly integrated electronics area, building efficient heat-transfer networks to obtain advanced thermally conductive composites is of great significance. In the present work, highly thermally conductive poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA)/boron nitride nanoplatelets@silver nanowires (BNNS@AgNW) composites were fabricated via the combination of the electrospinning and the spraying technique, followed by a hot-pressing method. BNNS are oriented along the in-plane direction, while AgNWs with a high aspect ratio can help to construct a thermal conductive network effectively by bridging BNNS in the composites. The PVA/BNNS@AgNW composites showed high in-plane thermal conductivity (TC) of 10.9 W/(m·K) at 33 wt % total fillers addition. Meanwhile, the composite shows excellent thermal dispassion capability when it is taken as a thermal interface material of a working light-emitting diode (LED) chip, which is certified by capturing the surface temperature of the LED chip. In addition, the out-of-plane electrical conductivity of the composites is below 10–12 S/cm. The composites with outstanding thermal conductive and electrical insulating properties hold promise for application in electrical packaging and thermal management.