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Posted by United Press International on March 9, 2010, 12:24 pm
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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.
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