Bioinspired, anisotropically highly thermoconductive silicon carbide/epoxy composite based on a nacre-mimetic architecture

Although nature’s wisdom resides in achieving an exceptional functionality, such as anisotropic properties by constructing intelligently hierarchical architectures, the preparation of bulk biomimetic materials under environmental factors is still a great challenge. Inspired from the transport behavior of ions and water through the directionally aligned channels in trees, we demonstrate a facile, scalable approach to construct an anisotropic 3D biomorphic silicon carbide (bio-SiC) framework in epoxy resin (EP) matrices. The 3D bio-SiC framework has not only the highly dense elongated microchannels in the axial direction, which serves as a phonon “expressway” to facilitate thermal conduction of the whole composites, but also the robust latticed structure in the radial direction restricting the molecular chain motion. Consequently, the novel epoxy composite (bio-SiC/EP) with a nacre-mimetic architecture has a high thermal conductivity (TC) of 10.40 W m^{− 1} K^{− 1}, an outstanding TC enhancement efficiency of 253 per 1 vol% filler at ~ 22 vol% bio-SiC loading, together with an extremely low coefficient of linear thermal expansion (CLTE) of 12.44 ppm K^{− 1} (~ 17 vol%), an excellent thermal stability, a remarkable anti-flaming performance, and a high flexural strength of 184 MPa (~ 17 vol%). Our finding gives a promising insight to achieve anisotropically highly thermoconductive polymer-based thermal management materials.