Highly thermal conductive polymer composites via constructing micro-phragmites communis structured carbon fibers

Abstract The high integration and high power devices cause serious local heat accumulation, which will damage the reliability and service life of devices. Efficient heat dissipation has become priority issues for electronic devices. As a one-dimension thermal conductive fillers, carbon fibers (CFs) exhibits ultra-high thermal conductive performance. However, the superiority is not fully utilized by traditional approaches especially for short CFs. In this work, a micro-phragmites communis structure was constructed for enhance thermal transfer property of composites. And the composites were obtained by immersed in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) with vacuum-assisted. Owing to vertical CFs structure, the through-plane thermal conductivity of polymer composites achieving 6.04 W m −1  K −1 at low CFs loading. Further, the surface temperature variation of composites in heating and cooling process was observed by infrared camera, and it exhibits excellent heat transfer performance. The applicability of the high thermal conductive composite was investigated by applied in CPU heat dissipation. This work reveals promising approaches for fully utilize the ultra-high axes thermal conductivity of CFs to prepared high thermal conductive composites.