Highly Thermally Conductive Composite Films Based on Nanofibrillated Cellulose in Situ Coated with a Small Amount of Silver Nanoparticles

Ziming Shen; Jiachun Feng

doi:10.1021/acsami.8b07249

Highly Thermally Conductive Composite Films Based on Nanofibrillated Cellulose in Situ Coated with a Small Amount of Silver Nanoparticles

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2018 Jul 18;10(28):24193-24200. doi: 10.1021/acsami.8b07249. Epub 2018 Jul 3.

Authors

Ziming Shen¹, Jiachun Feng¹

Affiliation

¹ State Key Laboratory of Molecular Engineering of Polymers, Department of Macromolecular Science and Laboratory of Advanced Materials , Fudan University , Shanghai 200433 , China.

PMID: 29939007
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.8b07249

Abstract

In this paper, a freestanding flexible nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC)/silver (Ag) composite film with high thermal conductivity (TC) was prepared using the NFC that was in situ coated with a small amount of Ag nanoparticles through mussel-inspired chemistry of dopamine. The results demonstrated that Ag nanoparticles were homogeneously coated on the surface of NFC nanofibers and their incorporation had little influence on the film-forming ability of NFC. The NFC decorated with Ag nanoparticles could easily form thermally conductive pathways in the composite films, and the resultant films containing only 2.0 vol % of Ag showed a high in-plane TC value of 6.0 W/(m·K), which was 4 times that of pure NFC film. Moreover, the composite films exhibited relatively high strength and flexibility. The highly thermally conductive NFC/Ag composite films possess potential applications as lateral heat spreaders in flexible electronic equipment.

Keywords: chemistry of dopamine; composite film; in-plane thermal conductivity; nanofibrillated cellulose; silver nanoparticles.