New Plastic Blend Sheds Heat 10 Times Better Than Conventional Plastics

The spaghetti-like internal structure that most plastics possess makes it difficult for them to get rid of heat. Now, though, scientists have created a new plastic blend that can cast away heat 10 times better than conventional plastics.

Plastics are inexpensive, lightweight and flexible, which explains why they're found in products that range from electronics to cars to furniture. When it comes to heat, though, planes, cars and computers could all benefit from more heat dissipation.

The new material results from one of the first attempts to engineer the flow of heat in an amorphous polymer. A polymer is a large molecule made of smaller repeating molecules, and plastics themselves are common synthetic polymers. While previous efforts to boost  heat transfer in polymers have relied on metal or ceramic filler materials or stretching molecule chains into straight lines, these approaches are difficult to scale up. This latest polymer, though, could be the answer.

"Researchers have paid a lot of attention to designing polymers that conduct electricity well for organic LEDs and solar cells, but engineering of thermal properties by molecular design has been largely neglected, even though there are many current and future polymer applications for which heat transfer is important," said Kevin Pipe, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The polymer chains in most plastics are like spaghetti. They're long and don't bind well to each other. When heat is applied to one end of the material, it causes the molecules there to vibrate, but these vibrations, which carry the heat, can't move between the chains well because the chains are so loosely bound together."

In this case, the scientists devised a way to strongly link long polymer chains of plastic called polyacrylic acid (PAA) with short strands of another plastic called plyacryloyl piperidine (PAP). The new blend relies on hydrogen bonds that are 10-to-100 times stronger than traditional bonds found in plastics. This, in turn, means that the plastic can cool off rapidly.

The findings could mean a new way to cool off plastics and could be used in electronics in the future.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Materials.