Thermal conductivities of PU composites with graphene aerogels reduced by different methods

Thermal management has become a serious problem with development of miniaturized, high integration and high performance electronics devices, where the improvement of thermal conductivity on polymer composites is crucial for the internal heat transfer and dissipation. In this work, graphene aerogels (GA) with three-dimensional (3D) structure were prepared by a simple method and reduced by different ways. Then, GA were used as fillers to prepare high thermal conductivity polymer composites. A thermal conductivity of 3.36 W m−1 K−1 at room temperature was obtained when use polyurethane filling the hydroiodic acid reduced GA composite (HI-RGA/PU), and the graphene loading was as low as 2.5 wt.%. This result is better than most researches of polymer-based thermal conductive composites. Furthermore, the heat transfer test and thermal cycling test show that HI-RGA/PU has a good and stable performance in the practical application as thermal interface material (TIM), which proves that GA is a promising filler for thermal conductive material.