The poor thermal conductivity of bulk polymers may be enhanced by combining them with high thermal conductivity materials such as carbon nanotubes. Different from random doping, we find that the aligned carbon nanotube-polyethylene composites (ACPCs) has a high thermal conductivity by non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. The analyses indicate that the aligned structure can not only take advantage of the high thermal conduction of carbon nanotubes, but enhance thermal conduction of polyethylene (PE) chains. Our predictions may inspire manufacturing aligned polymer-based composites for a wide variety of applications.
@article{arxiv.1503.09000,
title = {Extremely High Thermal Conductivity of Aligned Bulk Carbon Nanotube-Polyethylene Composites},
author = {Quanwen Liao and Zhichun Liu and Wei Liu and Chengcheng Deng and Nuo Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.09000},
year = {2015}
}