The aim of this project was to determine the economic and technical feasibility of using readily scalable technologies for the development of inexpensive and high performance solutions for heat dissipation for the high-end automobile industry, as well as other markets including household appliances, injection moulding, advanced aircraft and pharmaceutical manufacturing, ranging from the actual fabrication protocols, down to a wide range of finite products.
As technology becomes more complex, industry’s dependence on advanced nanomaterials has increased enormously. In particular, the number of applications requiring more efficient and lightweight thermal management (e.g. advanced aircraft, car navigation systems, injection moulding manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturing, as well as daily use appliances), has considerably increased. Interfaces between materials have in particular a very significant impact on the thermal impedance of the systems, and in practice, they can be the dominant factor in achieving effective thermal transfer. The interface materials can be anything from substrates, heat pipes, coating, bonding, etc. Therefore a considerable industrial effort is currently focussing on finding alternative materials to act as thermal conductive elements and heat spreaders in an efficient, and cost effective way.
The work developed within this project solves heat dissipation issues by the use of novel 2-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials. 2D nanomaterials are hereby used as a solution to improve the ultimate heat transport, and providing at the same time a lightweight and highly processable, easily-scalable solution.
Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) for example is a common nontoxic material, isostructural to graphene, used already for its low electrical conductivity and superior lubricant properties. Due to its geometric similarity, h-BN possesses some physical properties similar to graphene, such as strong mechanical properties and high chemical and thermal stability and a theoretical thermal conductivity that can approach 1700–2000 W/(m·K). Another layered crystal exhibiting superior thermal conductivity properties is Carbon Nitride.
Moreover, the technology here developed has the advantage of being extremely versatile: 2D nanomaterial dispersions can be sprayed on their own directly onto surfaces or they can be mixed to different matrixes to obtain additional enhanced resistance to wear, abrasion, oxidation etc. This will allow us to improve the performance of existing systems, as well as improve the performance of new designs. Our developed solutions will not need to be applied through the whole heat recovery system, but mainly at those critical parts that limit the system performance.
