Polymers are usually the go-to material for thermal insulation. Think of a silicone oven mitt, or a Styrofoam coffee cup, both manufactured from polymer materials that are excellent at trapping heat.
Materials Science
Apr 29, 2019
1
297
If your laptop or cell phone starts to feel warm after playing hours of video games or running too many apps at one time, those devices are actually doing their job.
General Physics
Jul 5, 2018
0
55
Plastics are excellent insulators, meaning they can efficiently trap heat - a quality that can be an advantage in something like a coffee cup sleeve. But this insulating property is less desirable in products such as plastic ...
Polymers
Mar 30, 2018
4
166
New findings have solved a longstanding obstacle in research to understand the effects of heat conduction in solid materials, a critical issue in many applications, from energy conversion to electronics cooling.
General Physics
Dec 21, 2017
0
318
There's a known rule-breaker among materials, and a new discovery by an international team of scientists adds more evidence to back up the metal's nonconformist reputation. According to a new study led by scientists at the ...
Condensed Matter
Jan 26, 2017
7
4845
A growing interest in thermoelectric materials—which convert waste heat to electricity—and pressure to improve heat transfer from increasingly powerful microelectronic devices have led to improved theoretical and experimental ...
Nanophysics
Jun 23, 2015
3
1743
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have uncovered physical mechanisms allowing the manipulation of magnetic information with heat. These new phenomena rely on the transport of thermal energy, in ...
General Physics
Jun 8, 2015
2
1668
With more than five times the thermal conductivity of copper, diamond is the ultimate heat spreader. But the slow rate of heat flow into diamond from other materials limits its use in practice. In particular, the physical ...
Condensed Matter
Mar 6, 2015
0
1543
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz and the National University of Singapore have attested that the thermal conductivity of graphene diverges with the size of the samples. This discovery ...
Nanomaterials
May 13, 2014
18
2
(Phys.org) —Graphene, a one-atom-thick form of the carbon material graphite, has been hailed as a wonder material—strong, light, nearly transparent, and an excellent conductor of electricity and heat. But a number of ...
Nanomaterials
May 6, 2014
0
0
