Preparation of highly thermally conductive epoxy composites featuring self-healing and reprocessability

Enhancing the thermal conductivity of epoxy resin is an urgent demand for its application in electronic packaging field. In this work, thermally conductive epoxy/graphite composite featuring excellent self-healing and reprocessability is prepared based on covalent adaptable networks. The effect of graphite on the rheology, reprocessing, and self-healing properties of epoxy have been studied. The result shows that the prepared composites can be easily reprocessed and have excellent self-healing property. On the fundamental of the highly multifunctional performance of the epoxy composites, highly thermally conductive bulk composites are constructed via multilayered stacking up and self-healing based on the film composites, which is prepared using a rolling method. It is demonstrated that the films can assemble into new substance bulk by stacking up through self-healing. The high thermal conductivity is achieved by the highly aligned graphite induced by the rolling process. Result reveals that, being filled with 50% mass fraction of GR, the bulk composites possesses high thermal conductivity of 8.411 Wm(-1) K-1. This work provides a new strategy to prepare recyclable and highly thermally conductive epoxy.