Abstract Industries have been longing for highly thermally conductive polymer materials to cool the heating cores in modern electronics. Graphene-reinforced thermoplastic polymer, though supporting the mature technologies in producing heat sinks and plastic shells applications, often fails to realize its full potential in thermal conductivity (TC) due to the limited graphene loading and poor filler dispersion. Aiming at improving graphene/polyamide 6(PA6) interface, a filler/polymer compatibilization approach through grafting polyamide-miscible polyether components on graphene sheets (GSs) is proposed in this work through sequential dopamine and silane treatment. The PA6 composites filled with controlled loading of treated and untreated GSs were fabricated through extruding process. Compared to unmodified GSs, drastically reduced melt viscosity and enhanced filler dispersion are realized in modified GSs filled PA6 composites allowing further loading of GSs up to 28 wt% that enables the unprecedented out-of-plane TC of 6.13 W m−1 K−1. Besides, effective medium theory simulations suggest the significantly reduced interfacial thermal resistance in treated GSs filled composites at above percolation threshold, indicating the formation of thermal conduction network in these samples owing to the homogeneously distributed fillers. These results address the significance of graphene compatibilization approach in producing processible, highly loaded and well dispersed GSs/PA6 composites towards the design and application of highly thermally conductive materials for thermal management in advanced electronics packaging.

中文翻译：

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基于聚醚接枝石墨烯的增容效应增强聚酰胺 6 复合材料的热导率

摘要 工业界一直渴望使用高导热聚合物材料来冷却现代电子产品中的发热芯。石墨烯增强热塑性聚合物虽然支持生产散热器和塑料外壳应用的成熟技术，但由于石墨烯负载量有限和填料分散性差，往往无法充分发挥其导热性 (TC) 潜力。为了改善石墨烯/聚酰胺 6(PA6) 界面，在这项工作中，通过连续多巴胺和硅烷处理，提出了一种通过在石墨烯片 (GS) 上接枝聚酰胺混溶聚醚组分的填料/聚合物增容方法。PA6 复合材料填充有控制加载的处理和未处理的 GSs，通过挤压工艺制造。与未修改的 GS 相比，在改性 GSs 填充的 PA6 复合材料中实现了显着降低的熔体粘度和增强的填料分散，允许进一步加载高达 28 wt% 的 GSs，从而实现前所未有的 6.13 W m-1 K-1 的面外 TC。此外，有效介质理论模拟表明，在高于渗透阈值时，处理过的 GSs 填充复合材料的界面热阻显着降低，表明由于均匀分布的填料，在这些样品中形成了热传导网络。这些结果解决了石墨烯增容方法在生产可加工、高负载和良好分散的 GSs/PA6 复合材料中的重要性，以设计和应用用于先进电子封装热管理的高导热材料。