Elastomer-based thermal interface materials by introducing continuous skeleton to achieve the improved thermal conductivity and smart stress sensing capability

Owing to the rapid development towards high power density of the modern electronics, heat accumulation and low dissipation efficiency seriously affect its service lifetime. To settle this problem, polymer-based thermal interface materials (TIMs) with high thermal conductivity have become the mainstream strategy to eliminate influence of air factor between chip and heat sink. Herein, the covalently bonded CNTs-rGO hybrids assisted NR hydrogel was proposed by one-step method and then treated by hot-pressing approach to obtain TIMs. As a result, such TIMs exhibited a superior through-plane thermal conductivity of 1.82 W m-1 K-1, the good tensile strength of 14.5 MPa and the excellent stress sensing capability. The results demonstrated that the strongly interactions and well-ordered structures played the important role in ameliorating thermal conductivity. Simultaneously, the excellent stress sensing capability is benefit to detect its operation stability. Importantly, this work provides the meaningful guidance to design highly comprehensive performance TIMs.