Highly Anisotropic Thermal Conductivity of Three-Dimensional Printed Boron Nitride-Filled Thermoplastic Polyurethane Composites: Effects of Size, Orientation, Viscosity, and Voids

Extrusion-based three-dimensional (3D) printing techniques usually exhibit anisotropic thermal, mechanical, and electric properties due to the shearing-induced alignment during extrusion. However, the transformation from the extrusion to stacking process is always neglected and its influence on the final properties remains ambiguous. In this work, we adopt two different sized boron nitride (BN) sheets, namely, small-sized BN (S-BN) and large-sized BN (L-BN), to explore their impact on the orientation degree, morphology, and final anisotropic thermal conductivity (TC) of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) composites by fused deposition modeling. The transformation from one-dimensional axial alignment in the extruded filament to two-dimensional alignment (horizontal and vertical alignment) in the stacking filament of BN sheets is observed, and its impact on anisotropic TC in three directions is clarified. It is found that L-BN/TPU composites show a high TC of 6.45 W m–1 K–1 at 60 wt % BN content along the printing direction, while at a lower content (<40 wt %), S-BN/TPU composites exhibit a higher TC than L-BN/TPU composites. Effects of orientation, viscosity, and voids are comprehensively considered to elucidate such differences. Finally, heat dissipation tests demonstrate the great potential of 3D printed BN/TPU composites to be used in thermal management applications.