Nanopapers derived from nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) are urgently required as attractive substrates for thermal management applications of electronic devices because of their lightweight, easy cutting, cost efficiency, and sustainability. In this paper, we provided a facile fabrication strategy to construct hybrid nanopapers composed of dialdehyde nanofibrillated cellulose (DANFC) and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs), which exhibited a favorable thermal conductivity property. AgNPs were in situ proceeded on the surface of DANFC by the silver mirror reaction inspired by the aldehyde groups. Owing to the intermolecular hydrogen bonds inside the hybrid nanopapers, the DANFC enables the uniform dispersion of AgNPs as well as promotes the formation of the hierarchical structure. It was found that the AgNPs-coated DANFC (DANFC/Ag) hybrid nanopapers could easily form an effective thermally conductive pathway for phonon transfer. As a result, the thermal conductivity (TC) of the obtained DANFC/Ag hybrid nanopapers containing only 1.9 vol % of Ag was 5.35 times higher than that of the pure NFC nanopapers along with a significantly TC enhancement per vol % Ag of 230.0%, which was supposed to benefit from the continuous heat transfer pathway constructed by the connection of AgNPs decorated on the cellulose nanofibers. The DANFC/Ag hybrid nanopapers possess potential applications as thermal management materials in the next-generation portable electronic devices.
Keywords: hierarchical structure; in situ deposition; nanofibrillated cellulose; silver nanoparticle; thermal conductivity.