Enhancing thermal transport in ABS polymer with graphene oxide: Insights into low-temperature thermal conductivity behavior and correlation with Boson peak anomaly

The thermal conductivity of pure ABS polymer and ABS polymer composite with 0.5 wt% of the thermally reduced graphene oxide (trGO) was measured in a wide temperature range from 2 to 100 K. Adding 0.5 % trGO enhanced the thermal conductivity of ABS polymer by 1.5 times over the entire temperature range. A comparison of the thermal conductivity of ABS and epoxy-resin amorphous polymers and structural glasses shows that it is closely related to the concept of minimal thermal conductivity, which is determined by the intrinsic phonon scattering and the coherence contribution to the thermal conductivity in the material. The temperature dependence of the coherence contribution to the thermal conductivity, related to wave-like tunneling and loss of coherence between different vibrational eigenstates, was approximated by the exponential function of an Arrhenius type with characteristic energy E and a pre-exponential coefficient kappa 0. A proportional correlation was found between the low-temperature anomaly of the heat capacity, named the calorimetric Boson peak, and the high-temperature behavior of thermal conductivity of amorphous polymers and structural glasses. Thus, this study provides new physical information about the thermal conductivity in disordered materials and indicates a universality of its temperature dependence.