A high thermal conductive BN-ZnO NWs/PVA composite based on the oriented structure construction using ice template method

The increasing demand for effective thermal management in electronic devices has highlighted the crucial importance of researching composite materials with exceptional thermal conductivity in the field of electronics. A novel hybrid filler consisting of hexagonal boron nitride (BN) and needle-like zinc oxide nanowires (ZnO NWs) was designed and synthesized in this work, then used to prepare thermally conductive composites by mixing it with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) using the ice template method and hot-pressing process. The results demonstrated that a filler loading of 20 wt% yielded the highest thermal conductivity for the composite, reaching an impressive in-plane thermal conductivity of 1.77 Wm−1 k−1, which was 3.4 times higher than that of the conventional frozen pure PVA. This substantial improvement in thermal conductivity is mainly attributed to the synergistic effect achieved through the ice template method to construct a conventional orientation structure combined with the presence of BN-ZnO NWs hybrid filler. In addition, this composite also has good mechanical properties and thermal stability, etc. Our study shows that the BN-ZnO NWs/PVA thermally conductive composite demonstrates excellent potential as a thermal interface material for various applications in the field of thermal management of electronic devices.