Highly Compressible, Thermally Conductive, yet Electrically Insulating Fluorinated Graphene Aerogel

Abstract

Carbon-based aerogels have drawn substantial attention for a wide scope of applications. However, the high intrinsic electrical conductivity limits their potential thermal management application in electronic packaging materials. Herein, a highly compressible, thermally conductive, yet electrically insulating fluorinated graphene aerogel (FGA) is developed through a hydrofluoric acid-assisted hydrothermal process. The macroscopic-assembled FGA constituting of tailored interconnected graphene networks with tunable fluorine coverage shows excellent elasticity and fatigue resistance for compression, despite a low density of 10.6 mg cm^-3. Moreover, the aerogel is proved to be highly insulating, with the observed lowest electrical conductivity reaching 4 × 10^-7 S cm^-1. Meanwhile, the aerogel exhibits prominent heat dissipation performance in a typical cooling procedure, which can be used to fabricate thermoconductive polymer composites for electronic packaging.