Dihydromyricetin modification of boron nitride micro-sheets and construction of multilayer thermal conduction pathways in glass fiber reinforced epoxy composites

Abstract In this paper, a novel non-covalent treatment method for the micron-sheets of inert hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) was proposed by using natural flavonoid dihydromyricetin as modifier. The modified micro-sheets were further applied to fabricate thermally conductive glass fiber cloth reinforced epoxy (GFREP) composites. Specifically, the mixture of high concentration h-BN, acrylate copolymer and epoxy monomers were firstly coated on glass fiber cloth (GFC) to construct in-plane thermally conductive layer, and reduce the interfacial heat resistance between GFC and epoxy matrix. Afterwards, lower concentration h-BN was compounded with epoxy matrix, which provided through-plane thermal conductive paths and avoided excessive deterioration of mechanical properties. The produced GFREP composite exhibited high tensile strength retention (78.1%), excellent in-plane (2.36 W m−1 K−1) and through-plane (0.76 W m−1 K−1) thermal conductivity at 29.6 wt% h-BN content. This study offered an efficient way to develop high-performance GFREP composites with prominent thermal conductivity for integrated circuit packaging applications.