Preparation and Characterization of Al2O3-AgNP hybrids for Application in Thermally Conductive Polymer Composites

With the fast development of the integrated circuit towards high density, miniaturization, multi-functionalization, heat management become one of the top priority issues to be addressed. Owing to excellent physical and chemical properties, especially excellent flexibility, polymers have wide applications in electronic. Nevertheless, most polymers possess thermal conductivity below 0.5 W/mK, which cannot meet the requirement in modern electronics with high power density and high speed. Conventionally, thermally conductive fillers are used to enhance the polymers' thermal conductivity. Unfortunately, the enhancement of thermal conductivity is limited even at the high-volume fractions of filler (50% in volume). Herein, we report on an effective approach to preparing Al
₂
O
₃
-AgNP hybrids liquid-phase chemical reduction method. The Al
₂
O
₃
-AgNP hybrids consist of silver nanoparticles (AgNP) decorated aluminum oxide (Al
₂
O
₃
) microball. The structure and morphology of Al
₂
O
₃
-AgNP hybrids were confirmed. We demonstrated that the Ag nanoparticles with the size of 40-50 nm were uniformly decorated on the Al
₂
O
₃
surface, and the amount of Ag nanoparticles also can be tunable. We believe that this method has potential in preparing Al
₂
O
₃
-based polymer materials for application in thermally conductive polymer composites.