Understanding and manipulating thermal transport to our advantages are essential to intentionally design energy-efficient devices and systems while limiting the deleterious effects of adverse temperatures on system performance. Soft matter, with more tuning knobs in their complex structures than hard matter, offers tremendous opportunities to exquisitely control thermal transport properties. Thermal transport in polymers, however, remains largely unexplored due to their structural complexity and rich phase space. We have been seeking solutions to achieve polymer-based tunable thermal materials. In this talk, I will focus on two novel phenomena we discovered in polymers – thermal rectification in asymmetric polymers and thermal switching in thermal responsive polymers. More specifically, using molecular dynamics simulations, we found significant thermal rectification in tapered bottlebrush polymers and identified a new mechanism to explain the unusual directional dependence of heat flow. Using transient thermal grating measurements, we experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, the fast thermal switching enabled by thermoresponsive polymers across the lower critical solution temperature. We hope our work would stimulate more research towards organic thermal diodes and switches for dynamic space insulation and building envelopes, switchable thermal storage, smart textiles, and thermal computing. <br/> <br/>

Polymer-based thermal diodes and switches

2019 Fall National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.