An extremely thin material made from several layers of 2D materials seems like promising heat insulation for compact electronics.
@kralizec and subscribe to my Youtube channel at Kralizec Gaming Youtube ChannelCurrent electronic devices often get quite heated when used. This waste heat can be unpleasant but it can also be dangerous. When the electronics gets heated it can fail and in extreme cases – the battery can explode. To prevent this, scientists and engineers try to prevent the heat from moving from the electronic components that heat up to the battery.
This is where scientists from Stanford University come in. They invented a new material that is extremely thin but can prevent heating up as well as a hundred times thicker plate of glass and conducts heat worse than air at room temperature. Such a material could soon allow us to create even smaller electronic devices.
The creators – Eric Pop and his colleagues – were inspired by window makers. Those use multi-layered windows. Their insulation properties are based on layers of different thickness that have air between them. But the scientists used ultra-thin 2D materials instead. In total, there are 4 layers. Three of them are made from materials only 3 atoms thick – more precisely from molybdenum disulfide and tungsten diselenide. The fourth layer is made from graphene which, as you probably know, is made from a single layer of carbon. This makes the final material just ten atoms thick or about 50 000 times less than the thickness of a common piece of paper. Despite this, the material is incredibly powerful as a heat-shiel because the vibrational (and thus thermal) energy of the atoms is largely lost when they move from one layer to another.
There is one thing stopping us from making the nano-thermal-shield something we can see often. We need to find how to make a lot of it.
