New heat-conducting material is developed

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 9 (UPI) -- A U.S. research team says it has discovered a way of transforming polyethylene into a material that conducts heat as well as most metals.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists say most polymers are very good insulators for both heat and electricity. But the MIT team found a way to turn the most widely used polymer, polyethylene, into a material that not only conducts heat, but does so while remaining an electrical insulator.

The scientists said their new process causes the polymer to conduct heat very efficiently in just one direction, unlike metals, which conduct equally well in all directions. That, the researchers said, might make the new material especially useful for applications where it is important to draw heat from an object, such as a computer processor chip.

They said the key to the transformation was getting all the polymer molecules to line up the same way, rather than forming a chaotic tangled mass, as they normally do. The resulting fiber was about 300 times more thermally conductive than normal polyethylene along the direction of the individual fibers.

The research team, led by Professor Gang Chen, reports its findings in the journal Nature Materials.