Aligned structures of mesogenic motifs in epoxy resin and their thermal conductivities

The epoxy-based crosslinked polymer with the mesogenic group has been studied as a candidate resin material with high thermal conductivity due to the ordered structure of the mesogenic groups. In this study, we conducted all atomic molecular dynamics simulations with iterative crosslinking procedures on various epoxy resins with mesogenic motifs to investigate the effect of molecular alignment on thermal conductivity. The stacked structure of aromatic groups in the crosslinked polymer was analyzed based on the angle-dependent radial distribution function (ARDF), where the resins were categorized into three groups depending on their monomer shapes. The thermal conductivities of resins were higher than those of conventional polymers due to the alignment of aromatic groups, but no distinct correlation with the ARDF was found. Therefore, we conducted a further study about two structural fact…