High-performance boron nitride-plant fiber thermally conductive composites for enhancing thermal conversion of heated tobacco product substrates

Traditional paper-based materials suffer from low heat transfer efficiency, severely limiting the uniform and efficient generation of aerosols in heated tobacco products (HTPs). This study utilized cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) to surface-activate highly thermally conductive hexagonal boron nitride (BN) and uniformly dispersed it in a paper-based reconstituted tobacco (RT) substrate, successfully constructing a continuous heat transfer network. The composite substrate exhibits excellent out-of-plane thermal conductivity (0.1559 W/(m·K)) and an extremely fast transient thermal response rate (13 °C/s). Distributed activation energy model (DAEM) kinetics further confirmed that this optimized thermal conductivity architecture significantly reduces the apparent mass-loss activation energy during the thermal conversion process. Mass spectrometry results showed that, compared to the control group, the relative EIC peak areas (reflecting the relative release intensities) of glycerol and nicotine increased to 134.50 ± 0.68% and 158.38 ± 0.25%, respectively. More importantly, it achieved exceptionally good puff-by-puff release consistency, reducing the coefficients of variation (CV) of glycerol and nicotine release to 13.7 ± 0.39% and 21.11 ± 0.65%, respectively. Crucially, this work demonstrates a high-value industrial application of crop-derived nanocellulose, highlighting its tremendous potential in engineering advanced, bio-based functional composites for thermal management.