New study reveals polymers with flawed fillers boost heat transfer in plastics

Research team challenges the conventional wisdom that perfect fillers are better for making thermally conductive polymers

08-Apr-2025 - In the quest to design the next generation of materials for modern devices – ones that are lightweight, flexible and excellent at dissipating heat – a team of researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst made a discovery: imperfection has its upsides. This research, published in ...

When all details matter - Heat Transport in Energy Materials

Discovery could contribute to more energy-efficient technologies by allowing for the tailoring of nanoscale thermal insulators through defect engineering

12-Jun-2023 - Researchers at the NOMAD Laboratory at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society have shed light of the microscopic mechanisms that determine thermal conduction in heat insulators. Through their computational research they have demonstrated that even short lived and microscopically ...

Researchers report major advance in semiconductor materials

High carrier mobility in cubic boron arsenide offers promise for next-gen electronics

27-Jul-2022 - Researchers have for the first time experimentally discovered that a cubic boron arsenide crystal offers high carrier mobility for both electrons and holes – the two ways in which a charge is carried in a semiconducting material – suggesting a major advance for next-generation electronics. While ...

Thermal storage for the energy transition

The energy is not stored in the form of increased heat but in the form of a chemical state

05-Oct-2021 - In Germany, 55 percent of final energy consumption goes towards heating and cooling. However, a lot of heat dissipates unused because it is not generated as and when required. Thermal storage using zeolite material allows heat to be stored for long periods of time without losing any. Fraunhofer ...

Researchers discover a new inorganic material with lowest thermal conductivity ever reported

Breakthrough in the control of heat flow at the atomic scale

19-Jul-2021 - A collaborative research team, led by the University of Liverpool, has discovered a new inorganic material with the lowest thermal conductivity ever reported. This discovery paves the way for the development of new thermoelectric materials that will be critical for a sustainable society. Reported ...

Heat-Insulating Titanate

Discovering new leads for functional materials guided by artificial intelligence

22-Jun-2021 - Searching for lead materials with specific properties, researchers have developed a workflow that incorporates artificial intelligence to guide discovery of a new ceramic structure with particularly low thermal conductivity. As they explain in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the material has an ...

Miniature double glazing

Material developed which is heat-insulating and heat-conducting at the same time

21-Jan-2020 - Styrofoam or copper - both materials have very different properties with regard to their ability to conduct heat. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz and the University of Bayreuth have now jointly developed and characterized a novel, extremely thin and ...

Successful application of machine learning in the discovery of new polymers

24-Jul-2019 - As a powerful example of how artificial intelligence (AI) can accelerate the discovery of new materials, scientists in Japan have designed and verified polymers with high thermal conductivity — a property that would be the key to heat management, for example, in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile ...

Heat transport through single molecules

International team of researchers with participation of the University of Konstanz achieves breakthrough in the area of heat transport at molecular scales

22-Jul-2019 - Combining novel theoretical and experimental approaches, researchers from the University of Michigan (USA), Kookmin University (South Korea), the University of Konstanz (Germany) and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (Japan) have successfully measured and ...

Better thermal conductivity by adjusting the arrangement of atoms

22-Jul-2019 - Adjusting the thermal conductivity of materials is one of the challenges nanoscience is currently facing. Together with colleagues from the Netherlands and Spain, researchers from the University of Basel have shown that the atomic vibrations that determine heat generation in nanowires can be ...