Electrothermal Curable Epoxy Interface Adhesive Composite with Low Voltage: An Ideal Thermal Management and EMI Shielding Material

Traditional interface adhesive materials usually require heating or slow curing at room temperature. To overcome this defect, this study proposed a brand-new strategy: electrothermal effect of a conductive network was comprehensively utilized so as to generate heat only at the adhesive interface, which sufficiently promoted the epoxy to cure and cross-link to obtain a strong interface adhesion. Concretely, the Ni nanoparticles were uniformly embedded in the graphite foam wall to build a dense nickel layer by plasma-assisted activation. Then, the interpenetrating epoxy resin with a latent curing agent was filled into these continuous pores to achieve epoxy/Ni/graphite foam composites (EP-Ni@GF). The composites can rapidly heat up to 160 °C at a low voltage of 0.9 V, and the interface adhesive strength was 5.93 MPa, which reached 92.7% of the traditional thermal curing. Unexpectedly, the electrothermal area was concentrated on the interface without damaging the other components. The thermal conductivity of EP-Ni@GF reached 122 W m–1 K–1, and the Ni@GF exhibited extraordinary electromagnetic interference shielding effectiveness (EMI SE) of ≈111.23 dB. This work provided a new idea for the preparation of interface adhesive composites with high thermal conductivity and excellent EMI shielding.