MXene multi-functionalization of polyrotaxane based PCMs and the applications in electronic devices thermal management

The aim of this work was to improve the thermal conductivity and electromagnetic shielding of the leakage proof phase change materials (PCMs), in which a polyrotaxane (PLR) was used as a support material to encapsulate PEG 1k or PEG 6k and MXene as multi-functional filler. The PCMs can be processed conveniently by a hot press and the PEG 1k containing samples showed excellent flexibility. We conducted a systematic evaluation of the phase transition behavior of the material, thermal conductivity and electromagnetic shielding performance tests. Notably, the PCMs achieved a high enthalpy values (123.9–159.6 ​J/g). The PCMs exhibited an increase of 44.3 ​%, and 137.5 ​% in thermal conductivity values with higher MXene content (5 ​wt%) for PLR-PEG6k and PLR-PEG1k, respectively, and show high shape stability and no leakage during and after phase transition. The introduction of MXene can significantly improve the electromagnetic shielding performance of PCM composites. Typically, higher conductive samples (samples which contain high MXene contents) offer a higher EMI SE shielding, reaching a maximum of 4.67 ​dB at 5.6 ​GHz for PLR-1K-MX5. These improvements solve the main problems of organic PEG based PCMs, thus making PLR-PEG-MXene based PCMs good candidates for thermoregulators of both solid-state disks and smart phone. It is worth pointing out that the sample PLR-1k-MX5 can decrease 4.3 ​°C of the reference temperature during cellphone running. Moreover, the temperature of the protecting sheet in the simulated solid state disk with PCM was significantly lower (showing a decreasing of 7.9 ​°C) compared with the blank sample.