Multilayered structural design of flexible films for smart thermal management

Intelligent materials have the ability to sense the environment and respond to their surrounding accordingly. Herein, the thermally conductive hybrid films were intellectualized by using activated shape memory composite as matrix, which endows hybrid films with active heat dissipation behavior. The obtained hybrid films not only visualize the temperature of the device by the change of shape, but also further improve thermal management abilities through the increase of contact area of the films with air in the shape changing process. The hybrid films also show high thermal conductivity because the multilayered structure was designed and constructed through the method of evaporation-induced self-assembly followed by hot-pressing technology. With the same content of graphene nanosheets, thermal conductivities of hybrid films are increased with the increase of layers. Five layered hybrid film shows the highest thermal management abilities and achieves the thermal conductivity as high as 19.37 W·m−1·K−1, which is 79.4% higher than single layered hybrid film. The structure design of hybrid films and their intellectualization opens up a new direction to improve thermal management effect of soft polymeric materials.