Enhanced thermal conductivity of networked stainless steel/ZnO/PU composite for thermal pad application

The accumulated heat in electronic equipment leads to deterioration of the device performance. Thus, the development of thermal conductive materials is highly-demanded. We designed a hybrid thermal conductive composite contains a stainless steel (SS) mesh as a networked skeleton to support the further in situ growth of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanorods (NRs), and the final SS/ZnO/PU composite is formed after covering a thin self-healing polyurethane (PU) layer. The results show that the fabricated SS/ZnO/PU composite shows a higher in-plane and through-plane thermal conductivity of 3.50 W m(-1) K-1 and 0.73 W m(-1) K-1 as comparing with that of SS/ PU (3.25 W m(-1) K-1) and (0.64 W m(-1) K-1). The stability test indicates that the scratched composite film recovers well without affecting its thermal conductive performance.