Nacre-Inspired Strong and Multifunctional Soy Protein-Based Nanocomposite Materials for Easy Heat-Dissipative Mobile Phone Shell
Shuaicheng Jiang, Yanqiang Wei, Sheldon Q. Shi, Youming Dong, Changlei Xia, Dan Tian, Jing Luo, Jianzhang Li, Zhen Fang
Abstract
Inspired by the hierarchically ordered “brick and mortar” (BM) architecture of natural nacre, in this study a rational assembly of boron nitride (BN) nanosheets was introduced into a mixture of trimethylolpropane triglycidyl ether (TTE) and soy protein isolate (SPI), and a strong and multifunctional SPI-based nanocomposite film with multinetwork structure was synthesized. At a low BN loading (<0.5%), the resulting multifunctional film was flexible, antiultraviolet, and nearly transparent and also displayed good thermal diffusion ability and exhibited an excellent combination of high tensile strength (36.4 MPa) and thermal conductivity (TC, 2.40 W·m–1·K–1), surpassing the performances of various types of petroleum-based plastics (displayed a tensile strength ranging from 1.9 to 21 MPa and TC ranging from 0.55–2.13 W·m–1·K–1), including nine different types of materials currently utilized for mobile phone shells, suggesting its vast potential in practical applications.