Improving the thermal and mechanical properties of silicon resin with functionalized graphene for electronic packaging

A liquid crystalline molecule—4′-allyloxy-biphenyl-4-ol (AOBPO) was synthesized and used to functionalize graphene. Then, the functionalized graphene were mixed with silicone resin as fillers to fabricate silicon resin nanocomposites. The resulting liquid crystalline molecule functionalized graphene sheets were characterized by fluorescence spectroscopy, thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The mechanical and thermal properties of silicon resin nanocomposites were measured and the testing results indicate that, both the mechanical strength and thermal conductivity of AOBPO-graphene/silicon resin nanocomposites (with filler mass fraction of 0.5%, 1.0% and 2.0%) gain great increase. When the mass fraction of AOBPO-GNS was 1.0%, the tensile strength of silicon resin nanocomposites came up to 5.455 MPa and increased by 430% over neat silicon resin; the highest value for the thermal conductivity of AOBPO-GNS nanocomposite was obtained at 2 wt%, and it comes up to 0.785 W/(m·K), which is more than 10 times over that of the neat silicon resin.