Highly Thermally Conductive Polymer/Graphene Composites with Rapid Room-Temperature Self-Healing Capacity

Composites that can rapidly self-healing their structure and function at room temperature have broad application prospects. However, in view of the complexity of composite structure and composition, its self-heal is facing challenges. In this article, supramolecular effect is proposed to repair the multistage structure, mechanical and thermal properties of composite materials. A stiff and tough supramolecular frameworks of 2-[[(butylamino)carbonyl]oxy]ethyl ester (PBA)-polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) were established using a chain extender with double amide bonds in a side chain to extend prepolymers through copolymerization. Then, by introducing the copolymer into a folded graphene film (FGf), a highly thermally conductive composite of PBA-PDMS/FGf with self-healing capacity was fabricated. The ratio of crosslinking and hydrogen bonding was optimized to ensure that PBA-PDMS could completely self-heal at room temperature in 10 min. Additionally, PBA-PDMS/FGf exhibits a high tensile strength of 2.23 +/- 0.15 MPa at break and high thermal conductivity of 13 +/- 0.2 W m(-1) K-1; of which the self-healing efficiencies were 100% and 98.65% at room temperature for tensile strength and thermal conductivity, respectively. The excellent self-healing performance comes from the efficient supramolecular interaction between polymer molecules, as well as polymer molecule and graphene. This kind of thermal conductive self-healing composite has important application prospects in the heat dissipation field of next generation electronic devices in the future.

Automated summary

This article proposes a method for repairing composite materials using supramolecular effects and successfully fabricates a self-healing PBA-PDMS/FGf composite material with high thermal conductivity. The composite material can completely self-heal at room temperature and has high tensile strength and thermal conductivity. The excellent self-healing performance is due to the efficient supramolecular interaction between polymer molecules and between polymer molecules and graphene. This composite material has important application prospects in the heat dissipation field of next-generation electronic devices in the future.