Controllable Preparation of Oriented Boron Nitride Nanosheets/Polyacrylate Pressure-Sensitive Adhesive Composites with Enhanced Thermal Conductivity

Traditional approaches to constructing thermally conductive networks typically necessitate costly equipment and intricate processes, rendering them unsuitable for mass production and commercialization. Here, we propose a facile strategy to construct highly oriented boron nitride/polyacrylate pressure-sensitive adhesive frameworks by a calendering process. A UV light-based bulk polymerization method is adopted to prepare the pressure-sensitive adhesives (PSAs), which makes the preparation process solvent-free and volatile organic compound (VOC)-free, and environmentally friendly compared to emulsion and solvent-based pressure-sensitive adhesives. This simple, economical and scalable method provides new ideas and ways for the preparation of advanced thermal conductive networks. The highly oriented and flexible m-BNNSs/polyacrylate pressure-sensitive adhesive composites (m-BNNSs/PSAs-Ori) exhibited a significantly high thermal conductivity (TC) of 0.9552 W/(m·K) at 25 wt% filler content. Significantly, m-BNNSs/PSAs-Ori composites showed a better thermal response than the single-layer thermally conductive pressure-sensitive adhesive. Moreover, the composites also possess excellent electrical insulation and mechanical properties. This exploration not only provides a reasonable design scheme for thermal interface materials, but also promotes the practical application of polyacrylate pressure-sensitive adhesive composites in thermal management.