Thermal Switching of Thermoresponsive Polymer Aqueous Solutions

Thermal switches are of great importance to thermal management in a wide variety of applications. However, traditional thermal switches suffer from being large and having slow transition rates. To overcome these limitations, we took advantage of abrupt second-order phase transitions in thermoresponsive polymer aqueous solutions to enable fast thermal switching. While thermoresponsive polymers have been widely studied for biomedical applications, their thermal switching capability has not been studied. In this work, we used poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) as a model system to demonstrate abrupt thermal conductivity changes of thermoresponsive polymer aqueous solutions across their transition temperatures by using a powerful approach, the transient thermal grating technique, which has high sensitivity. We observed a thermal switching ratio up to 1.15 in dilute PNIPAM aqueous solutions (up to 0.025 g/mL) across the transition. This work may provide new opportunities to engineer thermal switches using second-order phase transitions of thermoresponsive polymer aqueous solutions or abrupt higher-order phase transitions in general.