Thermal Conductance of Poly(3-methylthiophene) Brushes

A wide variety of recent work has demonstrated that the thermal conductivity of polymers can be improved dramatically through the alignment of polymer chains in the direction of heat transfer. Most of the polymeric samples exhibit high conductivity in either the axial direction of a fiber or in the in-plane direction of a thin film, while the most useful direction for thermal management is often the cross-plane direction of a film. Here we show poly(3-methylthiophene) brushes grafted from phosphonic acid monolayers using surface initiated polymerization can exhibit through-plane thermal conductivity greater than 2 W/(m K), a 6-fold increase compared to spin-coated poly(3-hexylthiophene) samples. The thickness of these films (10-40 nm) is somewhat less than that required in most applications, but the method demonstrates a route toward higher thermal conductivity in covalently grafted, aligned polymer films.