High-performance
thermal management materials are essential in miniaturized, highly
integrated, and high-power modern electronics for heat dissipation.
In this context, the large interface thermal resistance (ITR) that
occurs between fillers and the organic matrix in polymer-based nanocomposites
greatly limits their thermal conductive performance. Herein, through-plane
direction aligned three-dimensional (3D) MXene/silver (Ag) aerogels
are designed as heat transferring skeletons for epoxy nanocomposites.
Ag nanoparticles (NPs) were in situ decorated on exfoliated MXene
nanosheets to ensure good contact, and subsequent welding of ice-templated
MXene/Ag nanofillers at low temperature of ∼200 °C reduced
contact resistance between individual MXene sheets. Monte Carlo simulations
suggest that thermal interficial resistance (R
0) of the MXene/Ag–epoxy nanocomposite was 4.5 ×
10–7 m2 W–1 K–1, which was less than that of the MXene–epoxy nanocomposite
(R
c = 5.2 × 10–7 m2 W–1 K–1). Furthermore,
a large-scale atomic/molecular massively parallel simulator was employed
to calculate the interfacial resistance. It was found that R
MXene = 2.4 × 10–9 m2 K W–1, and R
MXene‑Ag = 2.0 ×10–9 m2 K W–1, respectively, indicating that the Ag NP enhanced the interfacial
heat transport. At a relatively low loading of 15.1 vol %, through-plane
thermal conductivity reached a value as high as 2.65 W m–1 K–1, which is 1225 % higher than that of pure
epoxy resin. Furthermore, MXene/Ag–epoxy nanocomposite film
exhibits an impressive thermal conductive property when applied on
a Millet 8 and Dell computer for heat dissipation.