Facile Fabrication of Silicon Carbide Spheres and Its Application in Polymer Composites with Enhanced Thermal Conductivity

There is an urgent requirement of satisfied thermal management materials to help efficiently diffuse the accumulated heat in modern electronics. The high-loading addition of ceramic filler into polymer is able to significantly enhance the thermal conductivity but inevitably causes serious degradation of mechanical properties. Thus, how to achieve desired thermal conductivity at relatively low filler content still maintains challenging. In this study, we report on a facile strategy to fabricate silicon carbide spheres (SiCSs), which can be applied as efficient fillers to construct three-dimensional (3D) filler skeleton in the polymer matrix. The obtained silicon carbide spheres exhibit fancy sea urchin-like microstructure with obvious radiating pattern. The polymer composites were finally prepared by adding the SiCSs into epoxy resin matrix. A satisfactory thermal conductivity of 0.91 Wm-1K-1 with the addition of 4.6 vol% SiCSs was achieved in the obtained composites. Moreover, the final thermal conductivity can be easily regulated by varying the added number of SiCSs. The above results illustrate that the SiCSs/epoxy composites exhibit high potential for application in thermal management field.