Abstract
The concept of increasing thermal conductivity for network polymers is described. Transportation media of thermal conduction is phonon. It is necessary to form a higher-order structure and a crosslinking density in the resin to make it easy to transport phonon. The epoxy resin having mesogen is self-ordered in curing and forms a higher-order structure and network structure, and shows a high thermal conductivity. In the composite of mesogenic epoxy resin and filler, the high thermal conductive region (focal conic domain) is formed around filler. When the content of the filler is low, the focal conic domain does not overlap. When the content of filler is increased, the overlap of the domain proceeds, resulting in high thermal conductivity. This is a technique that has become possible by using a mesogenic epoxy resin. The thermal conductivity of composite would be able to increase higher than that of alumina, using boron nitride. The maximum thermal conductivity of the composite shows 41 W/(m･K). As comparison, the thermal conductivity of the conventional epoxy resin was only 27 W/(m･K). We could confirm the superiority of the mesogenic epoxy resin.
